


Wing (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

by startingatmidnight



Series: Wingkipedia [1]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Established Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, F/M, Fluff, Wing Grooming, Wing Kink, Wings, both the feathery kind and the trope-y kind, or its a 5+1 things if you squint and give me a lot of leeway, otherwise titled: how chloe ended up with a wing kink she absolutely did not start with
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:22:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 66,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27596795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/startingatmidnight/pseuds/startingatmidnight
Summary: It's not a big deal, it's really not, and it's not anything weird, and it's not a 'fixation', thank you Lucifer. It is not weird to want to know more about wings after your partner keeps waking you up in the morning with giant, celestial equivalents to bird wings. She just wants to help Lucifer figure out why he keeps manifesting his wings in his sleep, and there is absolutely nothing more to it.No, she is not in the 'courtship' section of the Wikipedia page about preen oil. She absolutely would never do that.Shut up.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar
Series: Wingkipedia [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2168721
Comments: 463
Kudos: 791
Collections: Deckerstar in the Bed, LUCIFER_FICS_





	1. Wherein Chloe Steals an Angel's Feather

Sometimes this happens: Chloe will wake up and there's a wing on her head.

* * *

The first time it happens, she jolts abruptly from sleep as something rustles into her head. Everything's dark. She's warm, but only on her shoulders and head. It’s like someone threw a quilt on her. The quilt _moves_ , and now there's something in her mouth, and she sits up, spluttering.

The quilt slides from her head. It folds itself up and spreads out again over her lap, warm and soft. The quilt has long, white feathers. The quilt is attached to her boyfriend's back. Lucifer's lying on his stomach on his over-large bed, wriggling a little like he’s still half asleep despite her outburst. He shifts, and the quilt in her lap flutters a little, kind of like a dog shaking off water. She notices there are two quilts; the other one is spread-eagled on Lucifer's side of the bed, feathers poking out from where they're bunched up in the silk sheet, fluttering in concert with the one on her lap. The feathers are pure white. Where the feathers meet Lucifer's shoulder blades, they trail down his back like a cloak.

"Detective?" Lucifer mumbles beside her, lifting his head from his pillow and blinking muzzily into the morning sunlight.

Chloe puts a tentative hand to her lips, feels in her mouth, and unsticks the mystery object from her tongue. It's a small, downy feather. Barely an inch long, almost all fluff unlike the long flight feathers that are currently nestled in her lap. She looks down at him, feather held in her hand.

Lucifer is staring at her, his eyes comically wide. She stares at him. She stares at his wings. _Holy shit, okay, wings. Obviously. Angel. Feathers. Get with the picture, Decker._

Lucifer's mouth opens, then closes. He lifts his wing tentatively from her lap, sits up, untangles his other wing from the sheet, and folds both of them close to his back. He's still naked. That makes the wings seem somehow _weirder_ , and Chloe's not even sure _how_.

"This isn't," Lucifer says, picking over every word, "how I'd particularly planned to show you."

"Uh-huh." Now there's a new relationship milestone. Usually there's a kind of order these things go in, like how 'living together' goes before 'make a joint bank account', but she's not sure how early in the relationship 'being shown your boyfriend's giant angel wings by being smothered with them in the morning' is supposed to go. Maybe she should start a Google Doc, or Excel or something, that codifies exactly in what order relationship milestones happen when you’re a normal human being who happens to be dating a fourteen-billion-year-old Biblical figure. The Devil, that is. Who has giant white wings. Which she knew, yeah, she's seen them, _once_ , but she'd been kind of _busy_ at the time. Just when she thought she had a _handle_ on all of this.

Lucifer’s looking at her closely, eyebrows furrowed, like he's watching for signs that she's about to snap and start screaming. His ridiculously strong hair gel seems to have finally given up the ghost this morning: his hair is sticking up at all angles, an errant curl flopping over his forehead. She briefly wonders if he has to gel his feathers straight and only barely keeps from giggling in his face.

"Detective? Are you alright?"

Chloe, not for the first time in the last three years, runs through the realities of her life. She spent the morning using the Devil's wing ( _wing!!!_ ) as a blanket. Her mouth tastes a lot like she just had a feather in it.

"What, you didn't plan to show me them again by, uh, hitting me in the face and giving me a taste test?" She asks, holding up the feather for demonstration purposes. Embarrassment is a rare expression on Lucifer's face, but he hides it quickly.

"They taste _divine_ , I'm sure," he says. She’s not sure what the emotion in his voice is. He isn't even trying to sell the double entendre. He shrugs his shoulders, flaps his wings, and they fold out of existence. The small downy feather is still in Chloe's hand.

"Not really," she admits, twirling the proof of Lucifer's divinity between thumb and forefinger. His wings had been fifteen feet long at least, but this feather is barely an inch across. The fluffy parts are damp and matted up where they'd stuck to her tongue, but it's as shining white as his other feathers. "Just taste like feathers, I guess."

He looks down at the feather in her hand with a frown. "Yes. Well. I... apologise, for that. I'm not entirely sure how that happened."

"It’s fine," she says. She's not sure exactly what he's apologising for. "You'd stolen all the covers anyway."

He laughs, but it doesn't really reach his eyes. He kisses her and rises, shrugging on a robe. He walks away to the bathroom.

She probably ought to throw it. She knows he's uncomfortable with his wings; even if he doesn’t really talk about it, she’s not dumb. The first and only time he's had them in her presence, he'd thought he'd never see her again. Hell, she’s seen _Amenadiel’s_ wings up close before she’s seen his. Still: when she hears the shower turn on, she walks over to her bag and tucks the little downy feather away in her wallet, in the empty laminate pocket next to Trixie’s smiling Halloween costume picture.

It doesn’t look divine. In fact, it looks like a slightly damp white chicken feather that she’s jammed into a laminate pocket in her wallet. It doesn’t, you know, _glow_ , or emit some sort of magical aura, or generally seem like anything other than a feather. Which almost weirds her out more. She’s gotten used to _weird_ , with Lucifer. The mundanity of it makes it feel private.

Lucifer doesn’t comment on the wings when he comes back out, dressed and still wingless. He seems to have used the gap in conversation as a tool by which to pretend nothing happened, which is really her own fault because she ought to have known he would do exactly that. She doesn’t press him. She doesn’t really know what that meant, to him.

She’s not even sure what it meant to _her_.


	2. Wherein Chloe Calls the Devil a Muppet

It happens again a few weeks later.

* * *

This time, when she wakes up, she doesn't freak out or eat a feather or anything. The wing isn’t jammed against her face, as she's not fallen asleep on her back this time. It’s tented around her, like her own personal pillow fort. Lucifer's turned to her in his sleep, his face so close to hers that she can feel each time he breathes out. The wings let in surprisingly little light: whatever they’re made of is denser than she would have thought. However, here and there are places where his wing doesn't lay flush to the bed, and the small chinks of sunlight that come through bounce and refract in his feathers, suffusing everything in a gentle luminance.

She studies his face. Lucifer's ‘devil face’ had started appearing when he'd been in a bad place emotionally, and he'd said he didn’t know how the wings had turned up the last time, so was he dreaming of something? He doesn't look like it. Lucifer looks peaceful, like he's dreaming of nothing at all.

She tilts her cheek into the rustling wall of feathers, experimentally rubs her face against it. The feathers here aren't the long feathers at the end of the wing: it's the small downy inner feathers at the top, puffed-up and soft. She smiles despite herself. _The Devil's fluffy side._

When she rubs her cheek against them again, this time against the grain of the feathers, his peaceful face scrunches up. The sunlight streams in as he lifts and stretches his wings: he flutters them, that same shaking-off-water motion he did the last time he woke up like this. The feathers rustle with the motion like leaves in a breeze, bouncing sunlight this way and that. She lies there and watches Lucifer wake up. Usually he's awake long before she is, so even this is a rare gift.

Unfortunately, _as_ he opens his eyes, he flutters his wings again, and the Devil’s fluffy side promptly whacks her in the head.

“Hey!”

“Oh!”

Chloe doesn’t have a feather stuck in her mouth this time, but she reckons it was a near thing. She rubs her head as Lucifer jolts up and yanks his wings away from her, holding them high in the air behind him like he’s mid-takeoff. It’s kind of impressive, really; how fast and easy the movement is, like they’re just part of his body. _Which they are,_ she reminds herself. The longest flight feathers just about brush the ceiling, and Chloe’s realises she’ll have to revise her estimate of fifteen feet. Maybe _twenty_? She’s not sure, she may just have a concussion.

“Are those things laser guided to my face or something?” she jokes, but she regrets it when she looks back to him, kneeling uncomfortably on the edge of the bed. _And he’d been so peaceful before_ : he’s bunched up as taut as his wings, his mouth drawn into a hard line.

“You’d think, wouldn’t you,” he says darkly, glancing up at the appendages as if to chastise them for poor behavior. “I really don’t know what’s causing all of this, Detective. I—”

He cuts himself off. He seems intensely focused on a spot just above her head. She frowns.

“What?”

He leans over, wings rustling above them, and plucks a feather out of her hair. It’s a little longer than the one she almost swallowed; maybe three inches long, more feather than fluff.

“Huh,” Chloe says, because she has no idea what to say. She doesn’t really have a handle on what his wings _are_ to him. Are feathers, like, sacred? Shit, she hopes not, she’s been carrying around the one she almost ate in her wallet like it’s a family photo. She really ought to have asked him about this before.

Lucifer looks down for a second at the feather in his hand, then looks back up at her hair. His fingers twitch a little. His wings are trembling from how high he’s holding them, like they might burn her if he lets them get too close.

 _Fuck it_. She can’t keep lying here with him looking at her like _this_ , whatever _this_ is. If what she’s about to do is sacrilege, she’s at least in the best possible company for it. It’ll get her some answers, at minimum.

She plucks the feather out of his fingers and tucks it back in her hair, just over her ear like it’s a pen she’s putting there for safekeeping. He doesn’t move. His wings are still trembling, stretching high above their bed, feathers flickering in sunlight.

“So,” she says. “Can I look at them?”

“You’re looking at them,” Lucifer replies, tilting his head. His eyes aren’t leaving the feather in her hair.

“I’d like to see them… properly,” she says. She’s definitely gone too far, he’s frowning at her, so she amends with a get-out-of-jail joke, “Unless it’s a thing to only hit your partner in the head with them.”

“It’s _not_ ,” Lucifer says, coming back to himself a little, “And if I do that a third time please feel free to cut them off yourself. I… you can look at them. If you wish.”

He seems unsettled. A muscle is jumping in his jaw. She sits up and grabs his hand, rubs her thumb over his knuckles.

“You don’t have to,” she says, “If you don’t want to. They’re yours, not mine. I’m curious, because, well, my last few partners didn’t have _literal wings_. But it’s also not my business if you don’t want it to be.”

She lifts her hand to the feather she’s tucked into her hair, starts to pull it free, and he reaches up and stills her. He takes the feather himself and tucks it carefully back into her hair.

“I have no issue with it,” he says, which she’d say was an outright lie if she didn’t know better. “You’re always welcome to inspect every inch of me.” The salacious smile is back, and _okay_ , maybe he’s not lying. _Insatiable devil._

Behind him, his wings lower and spread out wide, poising behind him in a way that almost looks biblical. Arched to either side of him, raised a little higher than his head, white feathers extending out to either side of the room, only barely brushing the walls. _Maybe that’s why his floorplan’s so open._ She doesn’t realise she’s been staring until he huffs a laugh.

“My eyes are down here, Detective. My my…”

She just knows he’s about to make this into some sort of accusation, and she groans out loud when he starts.

“This wouldn’t be a _fixation_ —”

“—It is _not_ a fixation, Lucifer.”

“Suit yourself,” he shrugs, eyes sparkling a little. “What would you have done with me, Detective?”

She slides off the bed, plucking the feather from her hair and laying it on the nightstand. He stays where he is, watches her as she goes all the way around the king-size. She reaches one wing and has to duck under it to get over to him, the trailing edges of his feathers tickling her shoulders, and he raises an eyebrow at her with something approaching amusement. Twenty feet was maybe a high guess, now she sees them at eye level. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet. It’s going to bother her until she figures it out, but she’s not sure if he’d be insulted if she put a tape measure to them. She’d ask him to _tell_ her, but she knows a measurement joke would be the only answer she’d receive and she simply won’t give him the satisfaction.

She comes around to his back, and he twists his head over his shoulder to look at her. There’s an edge of something in his amused smile.

“If you’re planning on riding me, as it were, at least give me a moment to prepare.”

“I’m just _looking_ , Lucifer.”

He shrugs, and his wings copy the movement. Right, because they’re attached to him. She needs to get over the idea in her head that they’re independent to his body. They’re not a costume, they’re _his wings_.

Lucifer’s wings both are and aren’t like Amenadiel’s, which is her only baseline for establishing normalcy in the _weirdness_ of this situation. Amenadiel’s wings had been a little smaller. They’d had a sheen to them like an oil slick, shifting between blue and grey in the low light of the basement. Lucifer’s wings aren’t shiny like that. They’re not _matte_ , per se, but they don’t reflect light like his brother’s wings do. They’re almost mundane, birdlike, like someone cut the wings off of a very large dove and glued them to Lucifer’s back.

 _Except they’re not,_ she reminds herself again, a little more forcefully. _He can hide them, but they’re no less his body than his arms or legs._

She’s familiar with the small fluffy feathers by this point, but those are the ones that cluster at the inner arch of his wing. On the outside of the wing, the feathers are much longer, look more practical. Some of them, the ones that stretch far across the room at the edge of his wing, are a foot wide and longer than she is tall.

The weirdest parts of the whole wing situation are the long trail-y feathers at the base of each wing. They’re long enough to hang down past where he’s kneeling on the bed, almost touching the floor. They’re arranged in a kind of diamond shape. She has no idea what purpose they could possibly have; she gets that the longest feathers are for flight, the fluffy ones for… warmth? Maybe? But a whole load of feathers at the base that trail down his back like a cloak? Chloe doesn’t see any purpose for it. Maybe she needs to Google this stuff. Hopefully at least some of angelic design is based on birds. _Or vice versa._

Another thing he seems to hide away with the wings is the musculature used to control them. There’s a bulge at his shoulderblades now, a criss-crossy muscle attaching to the base of his wings and stretching over his ribcage and shoulders. Humans _definitely_ don’t have that. Is it a bird thing? She’s not sure. She wants to poke at it a little, but something about this moment feels fragile, like she might spook him if she goes too far. She’s clearly been standing here too long already, because Lucifer twists himself around again, looks at her.

“Not broken back there, are we?”

“No!” she says. “No, I’m just… just looking.”

“Okay,” he says, one eyebrow raised, and turns back, wings lifting a little higher. He looked as confused as she feels. She keeps her tone light as she asks her first question.

“Any guesses why this happened again?” she tries. She knows he doesn’t _know_ , he told her that, but it wouldn’t be the first time that he hid a theory from her if he has one. The wings shiver a little in the air. Where he’s sitting on the bed, she can see one of his hands idly toying with the rumpled bedsheet. He doesn’t look back at her when he answers.

“None,” he says. He sounds frustrated. “Believe me, I’ll be making efforts to prevent it from happening a third time.”

If he’s even _implying_ cutting them off again, Chloe is going to speed dial Linda and throttle him, potentially not in that order.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he sighs. He sounds tired. “A couple hundred bungee straps. Perhaps some chains. It would at least make it harder for me to crack you over the head with them.”

She snorts, relieved. “I think I’ll live, Lucifer. I don’t mind, to be honest.” Her head still aches, and he twists around to give her a look she doesn’t understand at all, so she hastily amends, “Not the head injury part, maybe you could work on that, but the wings are… good. They’re fine. I don’t mind them.”

Lucifer’s mouth works a little as she speaks. When he replies, he sounds kind of distant again, somewhat bitter.

“Yes,” he says, “They do inspire that kind of reaction, I’ve found. Very _angelic_ , very _divine_.”

If she’d taken a moment to think about that, she probably would have recognised the tone of his voice for what it was, and she wouldn’t have said back, like an idiot—

“Divine is putting it kinda strong.”

Lucifer blinks. “Beg pardon?”

“I mean, maybe if you’re like, a nun or something,” Chloe amends, thinking about how everyone in the convent had reacted to Amenadiel, “But it’s more like waking up to Big Bird in your bed.”

Lucifer hasn’t looked this blindsided since she called him ‘cheap’.

“ _Big Bird?_ ”

Now she absolutely cannot back down. She bites the inside of her cheek to keep from giggling, because his wings are— _puffing up_ —

“Like the Sesame Street muppet? Big Bird?” Chloe’s voice gets a little strained and high at the end with the effort it takes not to laugh. Lucifer sweeps a wing over her head so he can fully turn around and stand up. His wings are drawn-up and fluttery, feathers sticking in every direction, his hair askew and curly, and it’s all she can do not to lose it.

“ _Yes,_ Detective, I am aware of what _Big Bird_ is,” Lucifer says, and as he says ‘Big Bird’ his wings flap a little in the air. The dam breaks. Chloe collapses into helpless giggles, doubling over, and Lucifer’s so scandalised that his voice starts to climb in pitch as he talks.

“I am _not_ at _all_ like the _puppet_ ,” he snaps, before immediately knocking something off his nightstand with the trailing edge of a puffed-up wing. Chloe doesn’t say anything because she’s too busy trying to stay standing, tears forming in her eyes.

“You are!” she gasps, before cascading back into laughter. She takes a deep breath so she can get the next part out without collapsing. “Tall and fluffy.”

Lucifer makes a noise like a stepped-on dog toy. “ _Fluffy?_ ”

“Mhm, mhm,” Chloe manages, beyond words. She wipes a tear from her eye. Her stomach _hurts_.

“I’m the _Devil!_ ” Lucifer says, like that’s somehow going to resolve the situation. “I’m _not_ … _fluffy._ ”

Chloe can’t even talk anymore, so she demonstrates by walking over and petting at the tiny soft feathers at the high arch of his wing. Lucifer freezes up.

“ _Very_ fluffy,” she finally says with a grin. Chloe’s mirth fades when she looks up at his face.

Lucifer’s looking at her like she… she doesn’t even know. Like she just hit him with her car? His eyes are wide and panicked. She snatches her hand back from his wing. The wing sways a little, toward her hand, away from it. He clears his throat, draws himself up, and with a shrug of his shoulders the wings fold out of existence.

“Breakfast?” he suggests, his voice shaky. It’s such a brazen attempt at changing the subject that it’s almost laughable, but she wants the out as much as he does. She nods and steps out of the way, lets him walk past her to the closet.

Okay. Look but don’t touch. Add that to the unspoken rules.

 _Fuck_ , she needs to figure this out.


	3. Wherein Chloe Reads Wikipedia

The third time it happens, only two days after the last time, Lucifer’s awake before she is.

* * *

She grumbles as the warm blanket’s pulled from her head, puts a hand over her eyes to protect from the sun. She hears that now-familiar sound of his wings fluttering. _Ah. Not a blanket_. Chloe squints into the sunlight to find him sitting up, one knee drawn high to his chest, leaning into it like he wants to curl up in a ball. His wings are spread low around him, slumped against the covers, sliding over her legs and off the side of the bed. He sits there for a long time, eyebrows furrowed in thought, staring into the middle distance. She closes her eyes, puts her hand back under the sheets, and pretends to still be sleeping. She’s not sure if she’s convincing, but he doesn’t say anything if she isn’t.

One wing rustles over the silk sheets, tickles her ear as it passes and shadows her face. She risks cracking an eye open.

Lucifer’s bent his wing inwards, and he’s raised himself to a kneeling position. He’s reaching up and back in an uncomfortable twist, and he’s reaching his hands to the wing.

It’s the right-hand wing. He’s reaching up to the high arch on the inside.

It’s where she touched his feathers. When he’d frozen up. When he’d looked at her like he was about to have a _panic attack_.

Unless she wants to admit to being awake, she can’t move herself to see what he’s doing, but he’s spending a _long time_ there. Did she mess the feathers up somehow? He’s constantly called his wings ‘divine’ and he’d said that people usually… react to them, that way. Which was a warning sign she really should have taken to _not touch them_. If this is like his desire mojo, and she just doesn’t react to him that way, she might not be seeing something everyone else sees. Which is probably a big shiny sign that says ‘this is an angel wing, dummy, don’t touch it with your sticky mortal hands’.

Lucifer doesn’t look like he can quite reach. The wing is straining forward, and he’s twisting himself in a way that would probably be impossible if you hadn’t spent millennia perfecting various anatomically challenging sex positions, but even then, if she’s seeing this right through a squint and past the obscuring angle of his other wing, the feathers seem to be ever-so-slightly out of his grasp.

He untwists himself and sighs, shrugging his shoulders. She can see the criss-cross muscle on his back shift under his skin and pull taut around his chest and back. The wings lift and fold, in and in and in, until they’ve folded themselves impossibly into nothing at all, and the X-shaped muscle fades into his skin.

Lucifer gets up and walks away, shrugging on a robe as he goes, to the bar. She closes her eyes again and waits ten minutes before ‘waking up’ and joining him, putting on his shirt to at least pretend at decency. He’s poured himself a drink: it’s not even seven in the morning. He greets her by commenting on their latest homicide case, and she steps with ease into the conversation, like nothing’s happened. She wanders over to the desk she’s commandeered at his penthouse for work, argues with him over suspects and motives, smiles as he makes morbid jokes about suspects and murder weapons.

In the back of her mind, she’s decided on a plan.

She needs to tackle this new problem like she tackles anything: with research.

* * *

Trixie’s entered the stage of her life where she wants to watch ‘Twilight’. Chloe’s fine with this; it seems kind of lame, but she remembers all too well the lame romance movies _she_ watched as a preteen, and it was only a few years ago that Trixie just wanted to watch ‘Frozen’ over and over again so at least this isn’t _that_. So fine.

Trixie likes to argue with movies when they don’t make sense. Chloe’s only vaguely watching the film over her phone, so she doesn’t notice what Trixie’s talking about at first.

“That’s so dumb,” Trixie says.

Chloe glances up. The main character is on Google.

“What is, monkey?”

“She thinks he’s a vampire so she’s _googling_ vampires,” Trixie says. “It’s so silly, just _ask_ him already!”

Chloe doesn’t say anything. She glances back down at her phone; checks how many tabs she has open.

Twenty-three. She scrolls through them guiltily.

**angel wings- Google Search**

**wing sensitivity- Google Search**

**Wing – Wikipedia**

**Bird – Wikipedia**

**Glossary of bird terms – Wikipedia**

**Bird anatomy – Wikipedia**

**Alula – Wikipedia**

**Feather – Wikipedia**

**Pennaceous feather – Wikipedia**

**Thermoregulation – Wikipedia**

**Plumage – Wikipedia**

**Uropygial gland – Wikipedia**

**Down feather – Wikipedia**

**Dust bathing – Wikipedia**

**Preening (bird) – Wikipedia**

**Allopreening in Owls: What Are Its Funct…**

**JSTOR Allopreening as Agonistic Behavi…**

Chloe stops scrolling and just deletes every single tab. She hadn’t learned anything anyway, other than how much bird behaviour is directed by the need to remove feather parasites. She’s pretty sure Lucifer doesn’t have those. There’s no Wikipedia page to figure out why Lucifer’s wings keep turning up in his sleep, or why he had been so horrified by her touching them, or whether or not she should really be keeping that feather she still stubbornly has in her wallet. Googling actual angel wings doesn’t help, because all she gets is a bunch of kitschy ornaments. She’s considering buying one as a gag gift for the office secret santa, but that’s a whole other thing.

All Chloe knows now is a whole lot about preening and wing maintenance. It’s not helpful, although it is mildly amusing. She’d like to see how Lucifer would take a dust bath.

She opens up her texts and scrolls. Lucifer’s sent her something about plans for tomorrow, when Dan’s going to be taking Trixie for the week. Ella’s sent a link on the ‘Tribe’ group text about a ‘foam party’, whatever that is, and Maze has gleefully sent links to article after article about electrocution deaths at foam parties, saying they should all go. Amenadiel’s sent her a ‘kitten of the day’ picture: she hasn’t clicked on it, but he’s done the exact same thing every day for three months so she knows what it is.

The problem is. She _has_ sources of information. Even if Google’s only useful for bird research, she knows, well, a literal angel. She’s seen his wings. He would have the answers she’s looking for. And Maze, while as wingless as anyone else (she thinks), has spent enough time around Lucifer and the rest that she probably knows a lot more than Chloe does.

The problem is, she absolutely cannot ask them. She doesn’t know what’s going on, but she’s certain from how Lucifer’s reacted that it’s too private to just start asking his friends and family about. She can’t get around this by just treating it like a case, this is part of their relationship.

Damn it, Trixie’s right.

They started Twilight kind of late in the day, so Trixie’s falling asleep by the baseball scene, and Chloe sends her upstairs with a promise that they’ll watch the rest soon. She switches HDMI ports and flips channels for a while.

She pauses on Animal Planet.

It’s some schmaltzy show about animal friends or something, but her thumb is hovering over the button to flip the channel. It’s a clip of two rainbow-y parrots. One of them is standing still on its perch, its feathers fluffed up. The other has its beak on the first parrot’s wing, patiently doing… something… to the feathers. The channel’s on mute because Trixie’s in bed, but Chloe watches it in silence anyway. She’s never given any attention to really _looking_ at bird wings before. She switches on the subtitles.

Parrots might be the most talkative of the Animal Kingdom

but they don’t keep up with each other by gossiping!

The second parrot lifts its head from the first parrot’s wings. The first parrot shakes and flaps its wings, then folds them against itself and bends its head to the first parrot’s wings. Chloe can see it digging its beak into the feathers, its tongue poking out and shifting, arranging, each feather in turn.

These scarlet macaws mate for life, and the best way

to solidify that pair bond is by grooming. By stimulating

the oil gland in the wing, they waterproof and clean

Chloe turns off the television, frowning.

Damn it, Trixie’s _right_.

Just ask him already.

* * *

Trixie’s going to Dan’s for the week, and Chloe had turned up to the office this morning with a stuffed overnight bag. Lucifer had looked at it and smiled like he didn’t believe she was really there, which is still somehow how he always looks at her when she comes over to his without being asked. They got off work late, and she insisted on stopping off at the store to get some ready-to-go sushi. He’d _let_ her, which is unusual. Usually he would complain, then loudly order delivery from gourmet restaurants that don’t deliver to anyone but _him_ until she would relent, rolling her eyes, and throw the sushi out. Tonight, he just grimaced dramatically and waited outside in the Corvette. Lux was packed tonight, but Lucifer barely gave it a second glance on their way to his penthouse.

Now, she’s perched on a barstool eating nostalgia-inducing bad sushi as he plays ‘Sonata for Piano No.5 in G Major’. His jacket’s off, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his eyes downturned to the keyboard. Lucifer always looks so comfortable when he plays. She’s not even sure how he remembers which Mozart sonata is which, let alone play them all with the ease and fluency of a classical pianist.

He’s in a question-answering kind of mood, and he can play and talk at the same time, so she asks. He smirks.

“It helps to have heard the original,” he answers.

“Really?”

“I spent some time in the court of Salzburg,” he says, and then looks up at her with a lascivious grin. He never falters on the keyboard. “ _In_ quite a few of them, point in fact.”

If he had sex with Mozart, she does _not_ want to know. _No_ , actually, she really wants to know.

“Mozart?” she asks, and his eyebrows raise.

“Absolutely not,” he says, like it was obvious. “Genius of a composer, but a touchy individual. Not my type. Now, Salieri…”

She snorts and goes back to her sushi. Lucifer gave her some chopsticks to use that she a hundred percent refuses to ask the provenance of. They look unbelievably expensive. She thinks they might be banded with gold. It’s probably some kind of statement about the quality of the sushi itself, but she isn’t going to take the bait.

Lucifer plays on, pausing occasionally between pieces to drink. She takes a deep breath and enjoys the moment a little longer; she feels like he might be receptive to more personal questions right now, but she could very well ruin the night too. She lets him play to the end of the concerto and start another before she talks. She’s going to start with a question on neutral ground. The thing she _wants_ to ask will almost certainly take the conversation to a dead halt.

“Can I ask a question about your wings?”

He doesn’t take his eyes off the keyboard, but his expression goes from relaxed to pensive. Still, she’s judged the moment right: he looks up at her with half a smile on his face.

“If it’s about last week,” he says, “I apologise. Again.”

“I’m starting to get used to being slept on,” she replies, poking an imitation crab California roll around on the plastic plate, and he chuckles awkwardly, returning his gaze to the piano. “No, uh, it was about… it’s kind of a weird question.”

“Oh, well,” he says, smiling with a lot of teeth showing, “I do in fact specialise in weird. Ask away.”

“Do you, uh… preen your wings?”

Mozart’s ‘Sonata for Piano No.7 In C Major’ gains an unusual new high note. Lucifer blinks up at her. “Do I what?”

“Preen them.”

“Like a _bird_?”

She wasn’t even _trying_ for a repeat of the ‘Big Bird’ thing. She has to keep going or she’s going to lose her nerve. “Yes.”

“I don’t…” he holds the word back from his tongue for a while, like he’s considering the ramifications of saying it out loud, “ _preen_ my wings. I also don’t peck at the ground or eat raw grain, if you’re wondering.”

“Okay, well,” Chloe says, “Sorry for asking, it’s not like I have a lot to go on other than birds.”

Lucifer plays for a little longer before he ventures a question of his own.

“Why _are_ you asking?”

“I was curious,” she says. “I mean, if birds have wings, and birds have to do it…”

“Yes, Detective,” Lucifer says, one eyebrow raised, “And I also don’t have to _eat_ or _sleep_. I don’t work by mortal rules. Unless you’re worried that I carry parasites?”

“Always, Lucifer,” she quips back, giving herself time to jam more sushi in her mouth before she does something stupid like speak again. He laughs, starts ‘Sonata for Piano No. 13 in B-Flat’. Midway through chewing her California roll, something occurs to her. She interrupts him mid-concerto again.

“Yeah, but… you _do_. Eat and sleep, that is.”

Lucifer doesn’t stop playing, but she can see by the jut of his chin and the set of his shoulders that she’s caught him in an evasion. She leans over, stares at him. He does not look in her direction.

“You do something _like_ preening them, then?”

He misses a key, and glares down at his piano like the Gb must have taken a day off and betrayed him.

“For millennia, I’ve been the object of all hatred and sin, and now I’m likened to sparrows and puppets.” She could be imagining it, but Mozart is starting to sound a little rushed.

“Lucifer.”

“Yes, occasionally,” he grates out, “I _maintain_ my feathers. I clean them. If you call it ‘preening’ again, I’ll throw that poor excuse for a sushi platter off the balcony.”

“ _Okay_ , so how does that work?”

Lucifer outright stops playing, hands lifting from the keyboard mid-chord. He lifts up his glass of whiskey and regards her over it as he takes a long sip. Chloe feels the need to fill the silence, so she does, gesturing with the chopsticks as she talks.

“Unless you’re flying out to the Mojave every so often, you’re not taking a dust bath—”

Lucifer almost coughs up the whiskey, putting his glass back on the piano. Chloe keeps talking before he can interject.

“—And like half the stuff I looked up involved powder down, which you don’t have, so is it, um. Preen oil or something?”

Lucifer looks meaningfully at her sushi and she shoves the last of it in her mouth before he can make good on his promise. She raises her eyebrows at him, waves her egregiously expensive chopsticks in the air as if to say ‘well?’

Lucifer taps one hand on the piano next to his now-empty whiskey glass. He has to take a few tries to start talking, his mouth opening and closing like he doesn’t know how to speak.

“Did you— Detective, did you spend some significant amount of time on this research?”

Now Chloe’s on the back foot. She wishes she had more sushi to eat. She chews very slowly, but Lucifer lets the silence stretch out expectantly until she’s forced to answer.

“No,” she says, and clearly that wasn’t in any way convincing, because Lucifer looks about ready to laugh in her face, and she is going to _throw herself off the balcony_. She hadn’t realised until she said it all out loud exactly how much she’d googled about feathers. This was supposed to be a _neutral ground question_. “Okay, fine, I spent like an hour and a half on Wikipedia. Trixie was watching a boring movie.”

Lucifer shakes his head a little, but he looks amused, not… upset, or horrified. Good. She still has his face after she touched his wings in the back of her mind. She does _not_ want to freak him out like that again.

“Well?” she says, refusing to let him psyche her out of the question. “How _does_ it work?”

“Just so you know, this, to me, is as if I took a sudden and intense interest in how you condition your hair, and I only googled dog grooming.”

“Yeah, except my hair doesn’t teleport into the room in the mornings and try to smother you.”

He has the good grace to at least look embarrassed. “Yes, well. Perhaps you ought to try sleeping with Medusa sometime, you may find it instructive.”

She’s not even sure if he’s for real right now, but she _knows_ he’s just trying to sidetrack the conversation into the realm of the weird and sexual, where he’s comfortable. She puts down the chopsticks and crosses her arms, watching him expectantly. He sighs dramatically.

“Are you ready for this, Detective? I use… a _shower_.”

She blinks.

“You’re serious.”

“If I didn’t lie before, I’m not about to start lying about how I clean myself.”

“In the shower.”

“If you hadn’t noticed yet, it’s a rather large one.”

“I just thought that was for… you know.”

“Orgies?”

“Mm.”

“That was its original purpose, in all fairness.”

“But aren’t wings waterproof?”

“Hair is also waterproof.”

Chloe sinks her head into her hands. “You take a _shower_?”

“Sorry to disappoint, Detective.”

“Now I just feel stupid. So, what, no preen oil?”

“…Er...”

She lifts her head from her hands. Lucifer’s got that look on his face that he gets when he’s still trying to figure out how to answer without lying.

“Hang on,” she says.

Lucifer clearly knows he’s been caught, because he gets up, avoids eye contact, and walks to the bar for a refill. She stares him down as he approaches.

“So I’m _not_ wrong!”

“That isn’t—” Lucifer pours himself a generous glass of a Macallan more expensive than her car. He looks _mortified_. “If Dad ever starts returning my calls, I am going to give him a _piece of my mind_ about borrowing half of celestial biology for humans and half of it for those lice-ridden vermin.”

Chloe hasn’t felt this vindicated in years of solving murder cases. “ _So it works like a bird_!”

“Yes, alright, a _little_ like a bird!” Lucifer says in a rush, and Chloe is going to put this on her _resume_. She cannot believe she really figured this out via Wikipedia and process of elimination. She taps the barstool next to her expectantly. Lucifer’s already drained half his glass before he even sits down. His face is a little flushed.

“I suppose Dad drew the line at installing plumbing in the Silver City, so, yes, fine, prior to the invention of running water there was oil involved.”

Chloe wants to scream her victory from the ceiling, but he’s looking embarrassed enough already, and she has mercy, so she likens it to humans instead of chickens, _like she really wants to_. “Kind of like how people keep making those articles about not washing your hair for two months to let the ‘natural oils clean it instead’.”

Lucifer blinks. “What? No.”

“Good, I thought those articles sounded bullshit. How does it go, then?”

“I’m starting to think it’s a good thing that you’re an incurable workaholic, Detective, because if this is you using your powers for evil, I can’t say I approve of the results.” He takes another sip of the whiskey, looks her in the eye. His smile is gentle, kind of sad.

“I’m afraid it’s not a particularly interesting answer. My siblings and I used to, well. I suppose you could say we used to _groom_ each other. Hard to reach your own feathers.” He sighs, and she can’t place the emotion in his voice as he talks. “There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in the Silver City, so it was the main, often only, way to socialise. Strengthen bonds. And yes, it also cleans and maintains the feathers. So there you are.”

Initially, that’s the _cutest_ thing Chloe’s ever heard, and she’s about to lighten up this moment of vulnerability for them both by asking if they braided each other’s hair as well. Then, the tumblers start clicking. Lucifer’s skittishness about his wings, his bitter comments about divinity, the look on his face when she’d touched them. It all mixes in together in her head with that stupid pair bond parrot show and her heart drops to her stomach.

 _My siblings used to_ — oh no. No wonder, _no wonder_ , he freaked out so bad when she _held_ his feathers, put them in her _hair_ , _touched his wing_. Had anyone else done anything that in millennia, in _eons_? And there she’d been removing feathers from her mouth and calling him ‘Big Bird’ and petting his—

 _Lucifer wasn’t taken aback because wings are too divine or sacred for her to touch, he was taken aback because nobody’s_ — there’s no way, there’s no _way_.

“…Huh,” she says, feeling that pit in her stomach widen, her nose warm, her eyes prickle. She needs to move. If she looks in his eyes any longer, _she’s_ going to freak out. She stands up and walks behind the bar, crouches down to grab the closest bottle of wine, discreetly rubs at her eyes until she’s scrubbed away the impending tears. Lucifer’s watching her as she stands back up. He’s finished the rest of his Macallan; he’s toying with the glass in one hand, tilting it this way and that. He shrugs one shoulder, a gently amused smile on his face.

“Well? I’m waiting. What does _that_ remind you of? Sam the Eagle, perhaps? A budgie?”

She has to ask. She can’t let this eat away at her a second longer, _she has to ask_.

“And since then?”

“Sorry?”

“Have you— done that, since then? Groomed them? With someone?”

“Oh.” he blinks. “No. You’ve seen them; I would have presumed that was obvious.”

 _How is that obvious_ , she wants to say, but what happens instead is that she has to set the wine bottle on the counter so she can cover her mouth or she is going to _cry out loud_. Her eyes are burning with unshed tears again. Lucifer stands up like he’s been electrocuted, crosses to her side of the bar, one hand going up to hover uncertainly by her waist like he thinks she’s about to fall over.

“—Um. Is this— Detective, are you alright?”

She shakes her head no, because she knows that if she says anything it’s going to come out as a sob. Oh _great_ , now the tears are coming. She strides over to the empty sushi container and grabs the papery store napkin from under it, wipes at her eyes savagely. She is _not_ going to cry.

“Sorry,” she manages around the lump in her throat. Lucifer stares at her. He looks like he has absolutely no idea what’s going on, and _yeah_ , no kidding, somehow her light-hearted neutral ground question has somehow uncovered yet another depth of how _cosmically_ isolated he’s been for so long and how much she just keeps stepping over the line. She swipes at her eyes again until the napkin’s shredding up and there’s no threat of further tears, and clears her throat. “I just… I’m sorry. I kept making jokes, and I _touched them_ , and I didn’t realise…”

“ _Oh_.” Now Lucifer’s on the same page as her, which is a first since this whole thing started. He’s uncharacteristically serious, his eyes dark and solemn. “No. If anyone’s at fault here, the fault is my own. I haven’t been honest about… what that meant. To me.”

“And?” she says, already planning her response. She is going to sit him down and hash out exactly how to tell her when she’s crossing a line, she _knows_ he’s not used to people hugging or touching him when it’s not in a sexual context and this is like that but _a hundred times worse_ and she’s horrified she didn’t see the signs until now. She made him parade his wings for her like he was a show pony. The wings nobody has touched since time immemorial except to _cut them off_. Fuck, she’s handled this so badly.

Lucifer hesitantly places one hand on her arm, his thumb rubbing just beneath her shoulder. There’s a slight, reluctant twitch of a smile on his face. “They’re not strictly designed to be… just cleaned. Keeping them maintained, properly, requires someone to help. They’re meant to be touched.”

She thinks back to Amenadiel’s wings. Despite the darkness of the convent basement, they had been _glossy_. They shimmered between colours like an oil slick. Even in the brightest morning sunlight, Lucifer’s wings had been matte, closer to birdlike than angelic. Lucifer keeps talking, his hold on her arm tightening a little, as if he needs grounding. “But, ah, as you’ve said… it’s been a long time since then. So I’m afraid I was a little…”

He trails off. Looks up to somewhere just above his head, like he’s searching for a word.

“… _Overwhelmed_ , perhaps? You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just not used to it. Sorry.”

She telegraphs the movement very clearly, so it won’t make anything worse. She raises her arms and he steps forward into it, lets her hug him. He curls into it, rests his hands on her back, his head on her shoulder. She feels the tension in his back decrease, bit by bit, as she carefully strokes up and down the fabric of his shirt, the silk of his waistcoat. Apparently absolved of wrongdoing, she feels ready to try for a little levity.

“Sorry I called you Big Bird.”

He’s not audible, but she can feel him laugh a little. One hand comes up to cup her neck, his fingers nestling into her hair, carding through it gently.

“My reputation may never recover, Detective, but I forgive you.”

“What reputation?”

“Once again, in case you’ve forgotten, I’m the Devil.”

“Oh, right. Who ‘isn’t fluffy’.”

He grumbles something into her shoulder.

“What’s that?”

“I’m _not_ fluffy.”

“Uh-huh. Right.”

“You don’t sound awfully _contrite_ , Detective.” She can feel him smiling against her shirt. She laughs.

“Nope.”

“Care to prove your point, if you’re so certain?”

Her hands still on his back.

_Wait, what?_

He goes still as well. Backs out of the hug. She lets him go, looks at him curiously. He’s slightly flushed again. Is Lucifer asking her to…?

“Prove my—”

“— _You absolutely do not have to_ ,” Lucifer says in a rush over the top of her. His eyes are going very wide.

“You want me to groom you.”

He laughs, like she just told a joke, and picks up the bottle of wine she’d put on the counter earlier. She realises belatedly as he handles the bottle that she accidentally picked up a wildly expensive 1921 Chenin Blanc, but he’s not even commenting on it. There’s a slightly frantic look in his eyes. He walks around her to find a corkscrew and twists it into the top, decants the wine of sediment, pours it into two glasses, hands one to her. She doesn’t say anything. She is going to wait until he says something. He swirls the wine and inspects it, tastes it, and she drinks directly from the glass. It tastes like wine. It takes half a dozen slow sips, standing awkwardly a couple feet from each other at the bar, until Lucifer seems to get any words to come out of his mouth at all. He’s looking towards the balcony, not at her.

“…Chloe,” he starts, and her mouth goes dry. “I am very aware that you didn’t ask to be so _frequently_ accosted by my wings, any more than I did. I didn’t intend to ask that of you. I apologise.”

“Lucifer.” He doesn’t look at her. She puts down her wine glass on the bar and steps forward, just shy of being in his personal space. “ _Lucifer_.”

He looks up at her. That frantic look in his eyes is still there. He’s tapping the base of his wine glass absently on the bar. She puts her own hand over his. She makes sure he looks her right in the eye before she asks.

“ _Do you want me to_?”

He looks pinned down where he stands. His hand trembles under hers. He always tells the truth.

“Yes.”

“Okay, then.”

He exhales shakily. “Wh—”

“—I don’t know how,” she cuts in, suddenly aware of exactly how much she’s let herself in for, “So you’re going to have to walk me through this.”

It’s not often that Lucifer comes across as the age he is. Chloe has a tendency to forget, even when he has wings on his back or a devil on his face, exactly how _long_ he’s lived. Salacious comments about Mozart don’t really sell the hundreds of years that have passed between the event and the light-hearted story he’s telling of it. He just seems so… human, so often. She forgets to think of him as anything else.

But then, Chloe supposes it’s not often that Lucifer is offered something he hasn’t known in a timespan so wide and yawning that stars have lived and died in the intervening space.

The way he looks at her right now is indescribable. She’s simply never seen it on another human face. She feels stripped away by his gaze, like the force of it could reshape her, make her anew. If she had ever seen him like this, in the years since they had met, she would have seen him to not be human. She would have known him by his name.

He kisses her, both hands cupping her face, and she rests a hand on his neck as she kisses back and she thinks his pulse may be going at a rate that isn’t actually _possible_. By this point, he’d usually be picking her up to deposit her on the piano, or licking into her mouth, or sliding a hand between them to unbutton her shirt, but he’s not, he’s just leaning into her like he might _die_ if he loses contact. She takes his hand, pulls it away from her face, steps back a little back from him.

His eyes are wide and shining in the low light of the penthouse. It takes her a moment to realise they’re shining because—

She shredded the only napkin she had trying to keep away her own tears, so she reaches up and uses her thumbs instead. He startles, backs up and leans against the bar, yanks down a shirtsleeve and swipes at his eyes with it. She gives him time by going back to her wine glass, taking another deep drink. He glances at her guiltily in his periphery.

“Well,” he starts, voice shaky, “This isn’t typically part of it.”

“Okay,” she says, laughing a little, and he laughs too, soft and relieved. “So what first?”

He rolls his shirtsleeve back up, stands up properly, watches her intently. He looks more himself, when he speaks. She’s asking for him to take the first step. He is used to guiding.

“I don’t fancy smashing every bottle in the collection,” he says, and holds out his hand. She takes it, and he walks her to the balcony. Los Angeles is cooling in the dark, lights twinkling on the hills. The slight breeze ruffles her hair. Below, she can hear the sound of Lux: the chatter and clamour of a drunken crowd, busy traffic. Every so often a horn. The occasional sounds of partygoers having a fight, yelling at each other. It’s hardly angelic.

Not that she could give a damn right now. The Devil looks at her in the artificial light and noise.

“Now?” he asks, and she nods. He pauses, considering, and then unbuttons his waistcoat, laying it precariously on the railing. He unbuttons his shirt, and she watches him, finishing the last of her wine. He looks at her looking at him, smiling unselfconsciously.

“I can go slower, if you like,” he offers, and she smiles, pretends to consider.

“No,” she concludes. Lucifer’s answering grin is so _human_ : greedy and wanting, open and genuine. His shirt is probably a couple hundred dollars’ worth of bespoke tailoring, and he drops it to the ground at his feet, stepping over it to get to her.

She leaves her empty glass on a table, draws him in again. This time he is familiar; he confidently deepens the kiss, slides a hand down her ass, curls his other hand into her hair. He straightens up and looks around them, considering the space. He pulls her slowly to sit on the floor with him. She sits with her legs half-tucked under her, and he sits cross-legged. That look, the one bordering on inhuman, is coming back to him.

“Are you sure?” Lucifer asks. He would probably be horrified if she told him, but right now, in the glare of the light from inside, she can see a slight reflective film to his eyes, glinting blood red. She smiles.

“I’m sure.”

The wings unfold, snapping out at full stretch. She doesn’t flinch back: she is used to them now. Any shock or surprise has erased itself now that he’s spent a couple mornings using her head as a wingrest. Lucifer is watching her reaction, she’s not sure for what.

“I’ve been wondering,” she asks, “How long are they? It’s not twenty feet, but it’s _definitely_ more than fifteen.”

He looks so surprised that he doesn’t seem to think of making the obvious measurement joke, and for that she’s thankful. “Seventeen,” he answers earnestly and without humour. “Do you ever take a day off, Detective Decker?”

“No. Tell me what to do.”

He looks up at his right-hand wing, hands twisting in his lap, eyebrows drawn together in thought.

“The intent is to… the feathers are meant to lie together, without tangling or sticking out of place. Think of it like using your fingers to comb your hair. You simply need to run your hand through and guide the feathers into place.”

Okay. Doesn’t sound difficult so far. It's like braiding someone's hair at summer camp, except it's feathers instead of hair and instead of someone it's your boyfriend the Devil and instead of summer camp it's the Devil's nightclub penthouse. Lucifer tilts his head thoughtfully.

“There’s, ah— here.”

He twists himself a little and points. Where his wings arch, _just_ beyond where he can reach. She raises up to a kneel and looks closely.

“That’s where— well. If you start there, and then comb down…”

“Oh, so _that’s_ where the oil gland is?” Okay, now this makes sense. No wonder he can’t do this himself.

Lucifer nods. “I imagine the rest of it will be more of an… explain as we go along, sort of thing.”

“Well, alright then.” Chloe shuffles forward a little. “Do I start somewhere in particular?”

Lucifer’s long pause is punctuated by a car misfiring far beneath them, a faint drunken argument carrying over the sound of the crowd that sounds like it’s being conducted in Italian. Even in the lower light of the balcony, she can see a little bit of colour coming to his cheeks again.

“Would you mind by beginning where you were before?” he says. He sounds like he’s trying _very hard_ to be nonchalant about it. She nods, shifts herself over to the arch of his right wing, and he lowers it, the ends of his longest feathers only barely brushing over the balcony floor.

She goes slowly. She telegraphs the movement, like she had with hugging him. She tries to not think about how she can hear his breaths shallowing, feel his gaze on her. She tries to not let her hand shake too badly.

The dove-white feathers beneath her hand do not feel any more ‘divine’ or ‘angelic’ than they had before. They _are_ still fluffy, small and clustered at the inner arch of his wing, below where he’d said the oil gland was. He doesn’t flinch or freeze up when she carefully rakes her fingers through them. The wing doesn’t so much as shiver. She glances over at him for confirmation.

Lucifer’s face is the epitome of deliberate neutrality. Right now he could be sitting at the DMV.

“Okay?”

He nods. He doesn’t say anything. Okay, now her hand is shaking a _lot_.

 _Run your hand through the feathers. Comb from the oil gland. Okay_.

The high arch of his wing, the bone running above the downy inner feathers, looks _strong_. Birds tend to look kind of fragile, like you could snap their wings between your fingers, but the curve of Lucifer’s wing looks solid, like he could sweep it into a concrete wall and emerge the victor. He probably could. She rises up a little, examines the arch. It’s covered in a lot of thick, short feathers. When she can’t find the oil gland by sight, she hesitantly raises her fingers to where he’d pointed and brushes the feathers around until she sees it.

It’s a small, raised bump of skin. It’s kind of like a nipple, if you were looking to liken it to anything, but it mostly just looks like the pictures she’d seen of oil glands on Wikipedia. _Because he’s had them since before birds existed. Don’t panic, though_.

Chloe uses one hand to hold the feathers out of the way as she carefully rubs the thumb of her other hand against—

“ _Ah!_ ”

It’s like someone stuck a couple thousand volts into him. The wing under her hand flaps, _hard_ , and she topples backwards in shock at the same time that he crashes back onto the floor. His prim cross-legged seating position has become a backward sprawl, because he just spasmed his wings so hard that _he actually almost took off from the balcony_.

They look at each other in the night. Lucifer’s chest is heaving in shock. His wings are puffed-up and fluttery. His eyes are _glowing_ red right now, and they’re wider than she’s ever seen them.

Beneath them, as Lux reaches full swing, the thrum of dance music starts to gently reverberate the concrete.

Lucifer pulls himself to a seated position as Chloe drags away the hair that his wing flap had blown into her face.

“Okay,” she says, when it becomes apparent Lucifer isn’t going to say anything. “Wanna try that again, or…?”

“Mm-hm,” he mumbles, nodding shakily. He’s twisting the ring on his finger absently. His eyes are still glowing, cherry-red. Maybe she ought to say something.

“…Okay,” she says. He lowers his wings back where they had been before. They’re puffed-up instead of sleek now, each giant flight feather lifting free of the other. She brushes back the feathers on the arch of his wing again and this time puts her entire hand just above the gland, deliberately avoiding touching it, holding the top of the wing loosely like she’d hold his shoulder. It’s extremely warm. Lucifer tends to run hot, which is fine by her because then she can warm her feet on him in the mornings, but the wing trembling under her hand is practically feverish. She hopes that’s just a normal wing temperature. She runs her hand in the direction the feathers point, away from him, slowly, for half a foot. Stroking the top of his wing like a cat. She can feel him slowly exhale.

“Lucifer?” she prompts.

His voice is very quiet. She can see him still twisting his ring in his hand. “Yes, Detective?”

“You ready?”

He laughs, high and shimmering. “No, but do go ahead anyway.”

Chloe pulls both hands back, wraps her hand loosely around the arch of his wing again, and then runs her hand slowly up the top of the wing, in a direction that will take her directly over the oil gland. As she passes over it, he jolts a _lot_ , but he doesn’t take off, and she can keep her hold on the wing and complete the same stroking motion, and she considers that a victory. Lucifer inhales sharply.

She’s about to ask if he’s okay, but something distracts her. Her hand is damp.

She lifts her hand from the wing. Tilts it this way and that in the light from the penthouse.

The thin layer of oil coating her palm is golden. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected from preen oil, but _golden_ maybe wouldn’t have been in her top five descriptors. It’s got a sheen to it, and she can see that the top arch of the wing, the part she just passed her hand over, is…

It’s _shining_. It’s _glossy_. The white feathers have stuck together like they’ve been slicked to his skin, and instead of having the matte white sheen of before they’re…

She repeats the motion. Slowly. Telegraphs it. He jolts again, but less each time, and she runs her hand along the top of his wing again. She stands up and does it _again_ , walking herself along the span of his wing, five times in all, until she’s coaxed the oil along the entirety of the top ridge of bone. She stops as she runs into his flight feathers. She steps back from him and looks.

Amenadiel’s wings had shifted blue-grey in the dark. Even in the low light of nighttime Los Angeles, the soft glow of the apartment, the top ridge of Lucifer’s wing _gleams_ , white to gold to white again, flickering like pale fire.

She looks at Lucifer. Looks the Devil in the eye, standing over him as he kneels in the dark.

Judging from the wet tracks on his face, he’s been silently crying for a while. His hands are death-gripping his thighs, like he’s trying to keep from falling forwards. He’s staring at the floor. Her heart breaks a little. 

She kneels in front of him and he startles, clears his throat, rubs his hand over his face.

“You okay?” she says, whispering it in the little space she’s made between them. Lucifer nods, tiny shallow breaths punching from his body, eyes still gleaming red. She puts her hand up and swipes her thumb against the tear tracks on his face, and only realises after she draws her hand back that she’s painted him with golden oil. He shivers and bows his head, and she leans in to chase him, takes him by the chin and kisses him, oil-slick fingers softening the stubble on his face. He kisses back like he’s drowning in her. She can feel his pulse jackrabbiting under his skin. She breaks the kiss and leans her forehead against his. He’s shaking.

“We can take a break, if you need it,” she offers. He nods frantically, but doesn’t move. She shuffles up and sits next to him, bumping her shoulder into his, and he leans on her heavily, looks into the middle distance. His throat jumps and she hears him make a noise, swallow it down. Has he been trying to hold back from crying out loud? She opens up her arms and looks at him expectantly and he goes into the hug more readily than he’s ever done before. His wings rustle and close up around them, covering them like a tent. There’s almost no light but for, trailing up the right wing, a faint gleam of white-gold. She can feel him still biting back sounds. She cups her hand around his head, cards her fingers through his brittle gelled hair.

“You can be loud,” she says uncertainly. At first, nothing changes but for his hitching breaths becoming a little raspier, shakier. She pets at his hair, doesn’t move. The wings rustle above them, block out the last of the light. Lucifer makes a croaking sound, hides his face in her shoulder, and _sobs_.

 _Even if it takes me the rest of my life,_ Chloe pledges in that moment, holding her partner tight as he cries into her shirt _, I am going to find a way to meet God and kick him in the balls_. Touch-starved is a thing, she knows that, but this is a level of touch-starved that Lucifer’s father literally _designed_ angels with before _banishing one to Hell_. She’s never been angrier in her _life_.

The other thing Chloe pledges is that she is never, ever, _ever_ , going to tell Lucifer that his hoarse voice after crying sounds a tiny bit like Big Bird.

“My plan for tonight,” Lucifer manages, “ _Had_ been to take you to dinner and then shag you silly.”

She leans into him and chuckles. She hopes he didn’t make a reservation.

“And instead I bought some shitty sushi and made you cry on your balcony. Sorry ‘bout that.”

He makes a pitchy noise into her shoulder. “ _You’re_ apologising?”

She snorts. She can barely hear the sound of L.A. traffic inside their makeshift cocoon, but she can feel Lux’ music pounding beneath them, a steady one-two beat. She matches her breaths to it, waits until he’s matched hers.

Feathers rustle around them and the world reappears. Lucifer sits up and scrubs at his face, then regards his own palms confusedly; he’s managed to smear preen oil everywhere. He grabs up his discarded shirt and cleans his face off. His eyes have faded back to brown, but they’re bloodshot and puffy from crying.

“Alright,” he sighs, getting up slowly, “I think you’ve suffered through enough of this for one night.”

Chloe frowns. They’d barely even _started_ on his wings. “You don’t want to continue?”

“Unless _your_ plans for the evening involved putting up with _this_ ,” he says, gesturing down at himself with dislike, “I don’t see any reason to.”

Chloe could argue right now about how he hasn’t gotten it into his head yet that relationships are literally _about_ doing this kind of thing for the other person, but he’s not exactly in the kind of place to be argued at right now. She shrugs, stretches out from the awkward position she’d been curled into, keeps her tone level as she looks him in the eyes.

“I’m good to keep going if you want to. _Do_ you want to?”

Trapped in with a direct question, Lucifer blinks down at her uncertainly.

“…Well, I… Um. Yes? If you’re certain?”

She glares up at him. Pats the floor.

He sits back down, crossing his legs. His wings flutter around them, curving in a large loose circle around her.

“I’m warning you now,” Lucifer says, sounding a little lighter, “ _One_ bird comment and I’m leaving.”

“Lips are sealed,” she says. His laugh is soft and genuine.

The break and the crying jag have done a world of good. It’s clearly still a _lot_ for him, but he stops holding himself like he’s about to come apart at the seams. She gives him a break on the right wing and goes to the left instead, repeats the same process. Slow stroking of the top of the wing. Long unhurried motions _over_ , not _on_ , the preen gland. Rinse and repeat until the top of each wing looks like it’s been burnished with gleaming sunlight and her hands are soaked in oil, and now she’s faced with the feathers themselves.

She decides to go for the little fluffy feathers first, and she uses the remainder of the oil on her hands to card her fingers through the down on his right wing. He flinches as she makes the first downward stroke, eyes flickering scarlet, and she checks in with him.

“Perfectly fine,” he says. “World-class technique.”

“And _you’re_ okay?”

He tries to sound relaxed about it. “You can always slap me if I start getting emotional again.”

“ _Lucifer_.”

“Fine, _when_ I start getting emotional again.”

“Just let me know, alright?”

“Alright.”

She cards her fingers through his fingers again, stroking oil down into them. The tiny fluffy ends on each feather zip into each other, the sticky-up edges becoming sleek and smooth and lying flat. She carefully strokes over the oil gland, comes back with her hand soaked, works herself slowly down the inner feathers of his wing.

She’s starting to figure some things out.

She’d asked him earlier if he’d had his wings groomed since he’d left the Silver City, and he had told her that she’d seen them, it should be obvious he had not. She hadn’t understood what he meant. And she’d not understood why he was so obsessed with the concept of his wings being overly divine and angelic, like it might overwhelm her just to witness them.

Now she gets it. Each feather she paints with oil, gently brushes into place, is no longer birdlike. She’s not exactly about to get on her knees and worship him, this is the same man that steals pudding cups and smokes murder scene evidence if he’s not supervised, but there is something… _breathtaking_ about them. The dull pure white has become glassy, mirrorlike, but instead of reflecting back the low light of the evening, it flickers _gold_. She starts working her way along the longer feathers at the end of the wing, and the wing flexes unexpectedly. She lets go and looks over. Lucifer’s tilting the wing back and forth, watching the sheen of golden light dance across the white feathers. He glances up at her and huffs an uncomfortable laugh, pushing his wing back into her hands.

“I’d nearly forgotten,” he says, and leaves it at that.

She makes her way around the back of the wing slowly, minute by minute ticking by unhurriedly. She combs each feather back into place, untangles tangled vanes, lays each one flat and watches it zip into place and gleam. She finds herself almost at his back before she pauses.

There’s no clean divide where the wing ends and the skin begins: the feathers simply become sparser, smaller, and fade into his shoulder blades. She moves slowly across the base of the wing, slides her hand across his back. Paints oil on the tense cross of his wing muscles. Slides her hand to the base of his other wing. His wings flutter in the breeze. On the streets, an argument has started between two men. A car honks its horn. Lucifer exhales slowly.

“In the interest of full disclosure,” he says into the night, “I think it’s relevant to mention that I’ve been _rock_ hard for the last twenty minutes.”

She pauses, lifting her hands from his wings. Stares at his back. “Okay?”

“Mm.”

“…Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” he says. Unusually for him when things turn sexual, he sounds _embarrassed_.

“…Is this, uh, a new thing for you when… doing this?”

He doesn’t turn around, but he does tilt his head in annoyance.

“If you’re asking me if I tended to get a stiffy when my _siblings_ used to do this, the answer is _obviously not_.”

“Okay, sorry! Just asking.”

“It’s just a little different when you’re doing it.”

“Bad different?”

“If it was _bad_ different, I wouldn’t be able to _hammer nails with it_.”

Chloe, for the first time since this started, is going bright red. She still has a whole wing to finish.

“So you want me to keep going.”

“Yes. Just wanted to let you know.”

Chloe looks at the back of his head. He could have kept this to himself for _half an hour_. Now she’s going to be listening for—

She puts her hands back on his wings, one hand trailing down a long feather while the other strokes up his wing, and _yeah_ , listening for _that_. Lucifer’s breath hitches. He’s been hiding the sounds pretty well, but now she’s got her ear in. She experimentally switches between stroking his wing and gently pulling her hand down a feather, and okay, the _feather’s_ the one that gets the reaction. She pauses, considering, and then plunges her hands into the long trailing feathers that cloak his back, dragging down firmly and deliberately.

Lucifer _rears up_. His wings splay and fold abortively, and he makes a noise like he’s been shot, writhing in place.

Chloe lifts her hands from his wings. Lucifer shudders.

“You okay?” she asks. When he doesn’t immediately answer, she gets up and walks around to the front, stepping over a low-sprawled wing.

Lucifer stares up at her in dazed shock.

“Well,” he says, like he’s trying not to choke on his own tongue, “That takes care of that, then.”

Chloe can feel her jaw dropping and she doesn’t even bother to hide it. She looks down at his lap. He’s still wearing pants. His hands aren’t even _near_ —

“Did you just—”

Lucifer shifts uncomfortably where he’s sitting. His eyes are just about focusing on her. “Yes.”

Chloe’s voice is starting to come out as a strangled whisper. She crouches down to look at him eye to eye. “Were you even _touching yourself_?!”

Lucifer’s attempt at humour sounds like it’s coming from the inside of a well. “ _Something_ was being touched.”

“Uh-huh.” Chloe is going to throw herself off the balcony. She is _actually_ going to throw herself off the balcony. Why is her face so _red_?

“Just to say, Detective,” he says, “If you somehow become an amnesiac and ever want to do this again, I am going to _promise_ that it will not be as unspeakably mortifying an experience as tonight.”

 _Mortifying_ isn’t the word going through Chloe’s head right now. She’d just— put her hands in his feathers and— _just like that_?

Lucifer seems to have himself together enough now to be able to get his head into his hands, which he promptly does. He scrapes his hands backwards through his hair, which went from ‘wayward’ to ‘bedraggled’ half an hour ago.

“Are you willing to… just finish this and we’ll never speak of it again?” he says. After the hoarseness of crying earlier, he sounds like he’s on the verge of losing his voice.

Chloe’s not sure what she expected from a night that begun with the revelation that Lucifer, the most sexually charged man she _knows_ , is also the most touch-starved being in the _universe_. In all honesty, maybe she should have expected this. In the span of an hour and a half he’s gone from being _completely fine_ to _crying hysterically_ to _coming without even touching himself_. _She’d_ be embarrassed if any of that happened to her and she isn’t also, you know, _Lucifer_. Who’s had sex more than she’s breathed, and hadn’t explored his own emotional state until _14 billion years into his lifespan_.

Unfortunately, that means that not only does Chloe not know how to get him to not feel bad about this, like _any_ of it is his fault, she also doesn’t know how to express that as of thirty seconds ago she really, _really_ wants this to happen again.

Well. Not the crying part. Also not the embarrassment part. She’d really like him to not feel bad about any of this right now.

She mostly means the ‘ _I touched your wings a little bit roughly and you came like a freight train_ ’ part.

She doesn’t know how to say any of that, so instead she grabs him by the back of his neck, pulls him out of the ball he’s curled himself into, and kisses him so hard he’s almost entirely knocked backwards. He makes a confused noise into her mouth and flails, and she grabs him by the shoulders and holds on harder, keeps him upright, tries to convey as best she can without words that she—

Oh, she _does_ have the words for it. Hang on.

She pulls back. “I love you,” she says. Lucifer’s eyes snap open and he pushes her off him, staring at her incredulously.

“Excuse me, _what_? Did someone whack you in the head? Was it _me_?” He pulls his wings back and up, like they might imminently attack again, and she hopes he won’t get self-conscious about it but she laughs, hugs him closer before rocking back on her heels. He stands up with some difficulty, and she does too, leans against the railing of the balcony. She takes him in in the light of the Los Angeles night, the halo of the penthouse behind him.

One wing is dull white and fluffed-up, birdlike and bedraggled. The other is… well, it’s like the morning star. Sleek and beautiful, shining gold-silver-white-gold in the flickering lights of the night, absorbing and refracting in the glassy feathers. His hair is sticking in every possible direction. If he’s adjusting himself uncomfortably, she pretends not to notice.

He looks exhausted. He looks beautiful.

She has to figure out how to say any of this _right now_ or she’s going to give the Devil a complex for the rest of his very long life.

“I love you,” she says again, because that’s the most important thing. “Thank you for trusting me with this. With your wings. With _you_.”

He’s staring at her like she’s grown a second head.

“If you think you need to thank me for anything that I’ve put you through tonight,” he says, voice shaky, “You may need your head checked. I know a doctor.”

“I know one too,” Chloe says. “I think she’d tell you that relationships are built on trusting the other person. Do you trust me?”

“Of course,” he says, like it’s obvious, like that isn’t the craziest thing about all of this, that the actual biblical Devil just _lets_ her into this part of his life, _knows_ she won’t betray his trust, gives her the physical manifestation of his best-hidden vulnerabilities and lets her _hold them in her hands_.

She chokes all of that back, because if she starts crying then he’s just going to think she’s lost her mind, and looks him dead in the eye.

“Lucifer, we are going to do this again. If you want it to happen. I want it to happen. You have not _put me through_ anything. I love you and I _never_ want you to have to go that long without someone you can trust again. Also, you still look like Big Bird.”

The last part is a risk, but it works. His mouth works, for a moment he looks like he might cry again, and then he doubles over and laughs so hard that he almost falls over. He straightens up and folds in his wings.

“Belial, Satan, Beelzebub, Abaddon, the _Adversary_ , the _Devil_ ,” he says, “And then I meet you, Chloe Decker, and all I get is ‘Big Bird’. I’m the King of Hell, you know.”

She smiles, relieved. “Call me when you’re king of the precinct, ‘til then you’re Big Bird. By the way, if you think I’m grooming the other wing tonight you are a crazy person.”

“Thank _someone_ for that,” he says. “I think I’m going to fall over.”

“Do it over the bed,” she says, hustling the Devil inside. Their joined hands gleam gold in the light of the penthouse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The opinions of the characters on Twilight, the water permeability of hair, the sexual prowess of Salieri, the quality of century-old Chenin Blanc, and the theological ethics of woobifying the Devil, do not necessarily represent the opinions of the author. Apart from the last one, where it is the author’s opinion that for writing this chapter they would be, as codified in Dante’s Inferno, cast into the third ring of the seventh circle of Hell for blaspheming (to be here read as: woobifying Satan).


	4. Wherein Chloe Fights Crime With Bird Seduction

The fourth time it happens is the morning after a lot of other things happened.

* * *

Chloe’s woken this time not by feathers in her mouth or the feeling of a blanket on her head but by the glare.

“Bloody _hell_ ,” Lucifer mutters, lifting his head up and grimacing over his shoulder. “Will these infernal things not learn to take a break?

Chloe winces despite herself. “Is _this_ why they called you Lightbringer?”

Lucifer mashes his face into the pillow.

The wing that she didn’t groom last night, tucked up on Lucifer’s side, is snow-white and normal. Normal by her new batshit standard. The wing she did groom, nestled around her, is—

Well, it’s kind of like someone installed a lighthouse directly above her face. It’s so bright in the pale morning sunlight that if she even tries to discern feather from feather, she can feel her eyes starting to strain. Last night, the low artificial light had made his glassy-white feathers shine in sparse patches. This morning, everything is the same blinding white-gold, so bright and glossy that it almost looks as if the light is coming from within.

Yeah, _this_ would probably be a divine experience if you hadn’t seen them before. Unfortunately for Lucifer, she knows better.

She closes her eyes before she can get a migraine and wiggles herself into him. He huffs and turns to face her, holds her close as she snuggles up against the warm, broad expanse of his chest.

“Good morning, Detective,” he murmurs into her hair, one hand sliding over her waist. She hums comfortably, leans over him to reach for the nightstand, grab her phone. She checks the time.

It’s somehow only five-thirty in the morning. How is his wing _this_ shiny at five-thirty in the morning? It isn’t even that bright out yet. He tilts his head into hers so he can look at the time himself, then smiles and pulls the phone from her hand, replaces it behind him without looking.

“You are looking _resplendent_ this morning,” he says. Chloe closes her eyes and rests against him, enjoys the heat and comfort.

“Just good lighting,” she answers. He doesn’t answer, winding some of her hair around his fingers. Chloe considers the morning commute. Unless anything gets called in, she doesn’t have to be at the precinct until nine, which means she doesn’t have to leave until eight, which gives them…

It seems doable.

“You think we can get the other one groomed in time before work?” she asks. He doesn’t say anything, so she opens her eyes and looks at him.

He’s looking at the groomed wing jutting behind her. Judging from the way the reflected silvery light from it plays on his face, he’s tilting it to catch the sunlight. It’s strange, seeing these tiny hints of his lack of humanity: his pupils don’t contract when the light hits them. The expression on his face, sleepy and thoughtful, makes him look young. He tears his eyes from the light, focuses them steadily on her.

“I can’t promise there won’t be a repeat of last time,” he says softly.

“That’s fine.”

He regards her in his arms. She feels like she’s being weighed up, assessed.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever understand how you think, Detective.”

“Hm,” she says, “Well, right now, I’m thinking that I want to have time for breakfast before we leave.”

His pensive face breaks into a bright, genuine smile.

“Best get to it, then.”

He insists on showering before they begin, because the two of them collapsed into bed last night in the… well, the state they’d both been in imminently beforehand. Chloe knows from experience that she needs less time in the shower and more time on her makeup, so she showers while he picks out clothes for the both of them. He drops in halfway through her shower holding a coat hanger with a dress he cannot reasonably assume she’s going to wear to the office. It’s made of _webbing straps_. When she tells him no, he sighs dramatically and holds it up to her in the spray.

“You would be a sight to see.”

“I would also be _suspended_.”

He leaves a real outfit outside the shower door. She notes that the bra is _not_ one she owns. There’s still a tag on it. Is he buying her clothes? She turns it this way and that. It’s simple, black, unadorned. It’s exactly the measurement she wears, and when she tears off the tags (the _very expensive tags_ , holy shit) and puts it on, it fits like a dream.

Right. Okay, so now Lucifer’s buying her _extremely high-quality boring bras_. She doesn’t know how to think about that, so she pushes the thought down. She’s pulling on socks by the time Lucifer comes in, a bundle of clothing under his arm. His mismatched wings are still out. In the halogen bulb of the bathroom, his groomed wing swirls with miniscule patterns of gold on white, like an avian Rorschach test. He catches her staring, goes to say something, and then looks down at it himself. His eyebrows raise.

“Well. That’s a new one on me. Electric lights weren’t particularly in vogue the last time I looked like this.”

He looks a little dumbfounded, tilting his wing in the light, and she feels like she’s intruding on a moment she shouldn’t be party to, so she turns to the mirror and starts doing her makeup. Lucifer runs the shower and steps in. She’s still applying eyeshadow at first, so she only hears what he’s doing with his wings at first. The sound seems vaguely familiar, like she’s heard it in the past. She finishes the eyeshadow and turns around, looks at him.

He’s almost _impossible_ to see behind the puffed-up feathers. He spots her looking and lowers his wings so she can see his face. He narrows his eyes.

“If your imminent witty comment involves the words ‘bird’ or ‘bath’, I shall exact vengeance.” With that, Lucifer ruffles up his feathers in the shower exactly like… well…

She takes a page out of Ella’s book and pretends to zip her mouth closed. He glares at her. She turns back to the mirror to finish her makeup, smiling a little to herself.

Behind her, she hears the shower door slide open. Then there’s an absolute _cacophony_ of flapping, and now everything in the bathroom, including her, is soaked _._

She turns around. Lucifer is grinning like he hasn’t just signed his own death warrant.

“I am going to _pluck_ you,” she threatens, grabbing up a towel and dragging it over her hair, scrubbing off her eyeshadow. She’s going to have to do her makeup again. And wear different clothes. And find a new boyfriend. One _without_ wings. He laughs at her the whole way out of the bathroom.

She finds a completely separate, similarly appropriate pile of clothes already folded and set out on the made bed. Her mouth opens and closes. She strides straight over to the bathroom, opens the shower door, throws a coat hanger at him, and goes right back out again. He’s laughing so loud now that she can hear him as she changes next to his bed, and he’s still smirking when he comes out, dressed in dark grey sweatpants and nothing else. He has, unusually, applied no product to his hair at all. She’s used to seeing his gelled hair getting messed up and wayward in the evenings, an errant strand making its way from his signature careful style, but the large spiralling curls that are sticking up right now look almost alien on him. With the mismatched wings and the sweatpants, his five o’ clock shadow verging on a beard, he almost looks like an entirely different person.

“Where do you want me?” he asks.

“Same as before?”

He wanders to the balcony, and she follows him there.

“I was a little… distracted last night, Detective,” he asks as she steps into the cool morning air, “But did we set off a bomb in the area?” His right wing’s glinting in the daylight right now, so she can’t quite read his expression past the shine, but his back has gone ramrod straight.

There are oil stains _everywhere_. Every available piece of outdoor furniture, and almost everywhere she steps, has a feather stuck to it. His shirt is still on the floor and it’s shimmering with the amount of preen oil he wiped onto it last night. She has a moment of realisation, and walks over to the railing, leaning over— yup. He left his waistcoat on the railing last night, and far below them on the road she can see a crumpled scrap of plum silk shining in the early morning. Lucifer leans out and winces as a truck rolls over it.

“I’ve never before appreciated the virtue of employing cleaners that don’t ask questions until this day.”

“I _cannot_ believe you haven’t given them worse things to do.”

“None I wouldn’t have explained.” With his wings held behind him, the sun not on his face, she can see just how pink he’s gone. She leans over and kisses him on a flushed cheek, retreats from the railing. He follows her awkwardly.

“So, round two, Detective?”

She hopes she’s not dragged him into this. In the light of day, he’s looking nervously at the oil staining the concrete floor. “Only if you want to.”

He doesn’t initially answer, looking around them. He wanders to one side of the balcony, picks up and brings over a chair, some weird solid steel sculptural piece that literally nobody could lift and move casually but him. He turns it and sits in it backwards, arms draping over the chair back.

“Everything out here will need replacing anyway,” he shrugs. “Might as well get the most of it.”

“You’re okay with continuing?”

His eyes fix on her seriously. “Only if you want to.”

“I do,” she says.

“So do I,” he agrees gently.

The air is temperate; the sun hasn’t crested over the horizon yet, so it hasn’t yet picked up the characteristic heat of an L.A. morning. Everything feels fresh and easy, from their conversation to the way she leans down to kiss him. She’s used to the stiffness and residue of gel, so it’s strange and wonderful to run her fingers through soft and curling hair as she deepens the kiss. He hums into her mouth, tilts back a little on the chair. She breaks the kiss and walks behind him. He’s positioned the chair so that they’re facing out to the city.

His wings are low and relaxed, feathers brushing the floor. She surprises him, his shoulders minutely jumping, as she lays her hands on the small of his back. She runs her hands up slowly, making her way to the space between the wings. She can feel tiny flecks of feathers beneath her hands. She regards his left wing. The top ridge is painted with oil, but the feathers are damp and in disarray. The right wing has drops of water pearled on its surface, but they roll off instead of absorbing. _Waterproofing the wing, right_.

She slowly trails her hand from his back to the base of his left wing, slides her hand in a single stroking motion up the bone. He lets out a long breath, sagging a little into the chair.

“You good?”

“ _Divine_.”

“Ha ha.”

One pro of doing this in daylight is that she can see the way his mouth curls into a loose, easy smile in response. He’s dropped his head sideways onto the chair back, over his crossed arms, so he can turn his head around and watch her work. She can see how his lips part and his eyes briefly flicker crimson when she runs her hand over the preen gland, coats her palm in oil. Chloe begins with the trailing feathers down his back. She does _not_ handle them roughly. She does _not_ try for a repeat of last night. Even so, as she slowly paints them gold and lays them straight, his eyes shutter closed. His eyebrows knit together. He’s chewing the inside of his cheek.

“Lucifer?”

“Mm.”

“Is this too much?”

“ _Yes_ , but there’s really nothing you can do about that,” he answers. She slows down anyway to a glacial pace. He shifts a little in the chair. She ducks her head a little and, yes, he is already tenting the sweatpants. Wow, this really is too much for him. Her face is getting warm.

His feathers are damp from the shower, and they’re a little harder to move and align this morning. She finds her hands, oily and slick, sliding against the surface of the feather for a while before finding any purchase to smooth the oil into the vanes. It’s more difficult the larger the feather is, and so by the time she’s made it to the flight feathers she’s practically having to massage the oil into them. Lucifer watches her do it. She’s spotted him discreetly wiping a few tears away, his hands shaking, but he doesn’t seem as overwhelmed as he was before. Thank _anyone but God_ for that. Right now, his face is slack and awed as she slowly works her way along the longest flight feather, hands sliding a little on the ruffled edge. She glances up at him.

“How often should this be done?”

“Hmm, darling?” Lucifer lifts his head from where he’d laid it on his arms. “What was that?”

Chloe flushes at the endearment a little more than she expected herself to. He’s only said ‘darling’ to her once before since they became a couple, and it’s seared into her brain because when he said it, a few weeks ago, murmured into her thigh, she’d just had her fifth orgasm of the night and was holding his hair so tight she thought she was going to rip it out of his _scalp_.

“How often should this be done?” she repeats, hoping her face isn’t too red.

He frowns thoughtfully into the lightening sky, his breath catching a little as she runs her hand between his two longest flight feathers. She watches them card together and shine, a single glossy surface, and walks around to do the inside. He’s silent as she works. There’s a peace to him now; he’s clearly still turned on, but he’s languid and boneless as he leans against the chair, watches her set his feathers in place. She’s almost entirely done when he next speaks, just finishing up feathers laying errantly here and there.

“It’s hard to recall,” Lucifer finally admits. “I think it ought to be once a week, but I truly couldn’t be certain. As I’ve demonstrated, it’s certainly not an _imperative_. Why do you ask?”

She thinks. “Sundays?”

“Sorry?”

“I know you usually go to Lux in the evening, but maybe the morning or afternoon?”

Chloe runs her hand gently along his preen gland again, and he flinches _hard_. She looks over at him, hand ghosting over the surface of his wing.

He’s not crying at all but he’s got the same look in his wide brown eyes that he had last night, just before he’d sobbed himself hoarse into her shoulder. He’s straightened up as much as he can on the chair. He looks like he’s about to fall apart. Her hand tightens a little over his wing, just enough to bring pressure, hoping to ground him. She opens her mouth to ask him if he’s alright, but she shifts a little, like an _idiot_ , and she feels her thumb skate directly onto his preen gland, nail catching it ever so slightly.

The sound that comes from Lucifer would probably be a scream if he’d caught his breath first. She watches his eyes widen and flicker red and stay red, his mouth opening, his hips bucking so hard he rocks the chair onto two legs, almost overturns. His wings wrench themselves back from her grip and she lets them, holy _shit_ was that dumb. She is so _dumb_. Leave your hand right next to the most sensitive part of the wing, good going, Decker.

The chair clatters back to four legs and his forehead drops onto the backrest of the chair. The backrest looks bent for some reason, and then she looks at where his hands are and comes to the evidence-based conclusion that he just came so hard he managed to _crush the solid stainless steel in his hands_.

So her goal of ‘not being rough’ has really gone well. Lucifer makes a breathy sound like he’s deflating. His wings flap distractedly in the air, golden and resplendent. Oil splatters the concrete and glass.

She stands there in silence, not sure what to do. When Lucifer next speaks, head still tucked into the chair where she can’t see his face, his voice is low and strangled.

“ _Sundays?!_ ”

She’s broken him. She’s managed to make Lucifer come so hard that she’s _broken him_. This was maybe the last way she’d thought that could happen.

“Sorry,” she tries, “My hand slipped.”

“You want to do this every _week_?”

And to top it off, she’s managed to freak him out. Again. He shivers with his whole body, wings dropping and splaying on the ground, and then he shudders again, breath catching and wet, and _oh fuck she made him cry again._ This time she’s not even sure _how_.

“Um. Do you—”

She walks up to his side, holds out her arms in the hopes she can at least do one thing right. He lifts his head up, red eyes glistening, wild curls flopping onto his forehead, and he’s scrambling out of the chair and hugging her so tight she thinks he might break her ribs and _oh, okay_ , now she thinks she might be putting it together. She’s kind of crushed into his chest, but it’s fine. It’s okay. He’s not crying out loud this time, but she can feel his heart battering against her, his diaphragm shaking. He’s sniffling every so often, his chin tucked over her head. She hugs him back, tight as she can, feels his shaking breaths slow down.

The sun breaks past the horizon.

It’s like holding a star. His wings are tilted just right to catch the direct sunlight and they’re so bright she can’t even tell if they’re white or gold, shining onto them, bathing them in heat. The penthouse has disappeared, the sky, the sun; there’s Lucifer and her and nothing else, the world subsumed wholly in his light.

She can feel him relaxing his grip around her. The light tilts and then disappears. He’s folded his wings away. He steps back from her. The tears on his face are glittering in the sun, his red eyes almost painted gold themselves in the light.

“Sorry,” he says, “That was— mm. I need _another_ shower.”

He breaks away and strides inside, direct for the bathroom. She lets him go; getting distance so he can process his feelings is kind of his signature move. Also, there was a wet patch on his sweatpants, so yeah, showering’s probably a good call. She’s just glad she hasn’t broken him. Probably.

She reviews the even messier balcony, which at this point looks like it was inexpertly tarred and feathered. She really hopes his cleaners know what they’re doing, because if she was in charge of it she’d just bulldoze the whole thing and start over.

As she walks into the penthouse, she hears a crash from the bathroom. He strides out at speed, stares at her from across the room with wide red eyes.

“Have they been like this the entire _bloody_ time?” he exclaims, horror in his voice. She frowns and he gestures helplessly to his face. _Oh, right_. She _really_ should have told him about that.

“Oh,” she says, “For some of it, yeah.”

“ _Yesterday?_ ”

“Yes, then too. Lucifer, it’s _fine_.”

Lucifer gapes at her, his mouth moves without making sound, and then he silently rushes back into the bathroom. Okay, maybe she really _has_ broken him.

She looks down at herself. She needs another change of clothes. She is _covered_ in oil. There’s a feather stuck to her jacket. If she went to the precinct like this, she’d probably have to say she coated herself in baby oil and then rolled around with a bunch of chickens just to avoid the truth—

Oh _shit_ , what’s Lucifer even going to say in the office? _How was your evening, Lucifer, oh, well, my girlfriend correctly guessed that my angel wings work like bird wings do and then she_ —

She really hopes he picks today to learn how not to answer questions about his sex life in extreme detail. She rummages in her overnight bag for more clothes, then grabs the same towel she just used to dry her hair and cleans her hands free of preen oil. She gets changed, throws her oily clothes on the floor next to the wet ones from before, packs her bag for work, finds a good breakfast burrito place that does delivery. The delivery guy is almost here by the time Lucifer finally leaves the bathroom. He’s in a three-piece suit, navy blue with a pale cream pocket square. He’s coiffed his hair neatly straight. He’s trimmed his stubble back to its customary length.

His eyes are still Devil-red and panicked. He’s smiling like he can somehow pretend he’s not panicked at all.

“Detective—” he starts, as her phone chimes.

“Burritos,” she says anxiously, going for the elevator. He nods jerkily, waves a hand for her to go. She practically _sprints_ out of the elevator to the delivery guy. If she leaves Lucifer alone for longer than two minutes he’s probably going to, she doesn’t know, set fire to the apartment and pretend he never existed at all?

Just before she runs back into Lux, she turns a full 180 and rushes out into the road, flips off a guy on a Vespa who brakes hard and honks his horn at her, picks up Lucifer’s waistcoat from the ground, and rushes back in. It doesn’t look salvageable, but she’s pretty sure his tailors aren’t human so she isn’t going to make assumptions about what they can and can’t do with it.

Chloe returns to the penthouse with a slightly sweaty plastic bag of tinfoil-wrapped burritos, a silk waistcoat that half of L.A.’s overnight traffic has driven over, and her heart in her throat from running the whole way through the nightclub and back. He’s drinking something directly from the bottle.

She leaves the waistcoat on his piano bench and seats herself directly opposite from him, where he’s standing behind the bar. His eyes are still red. He’s drinking direct from the bottle of Macallan he had been sinking glasses of yesterday. He lowers the bottle and regards her carefully. She puts the burritos in front of them both, unwraps them when he makes no move towards his own. She does not act on her hunch about what he’s so freaked out about. There’s a potential _list_. He’s clearly shaken up, and she’s not about to play guessing games about what, she’s going to wait for him.

Lucifer stares down at the breakfast burrito like she’s just handed him a loaded gun. To demonstrate they are not, she starts eating her own.

He hesitantly picks up his burrito. Unwraps it. Inspects the ingredients like he’s performing an autopsy.

“They’re good,” she says, to prompt him. He re-wraps it and jams the corner of it in his mouth. He chews methodically, swallows. He puts the burrito back down and white-knuckles the bartop, crimson eyes glittering. She watches him carefully, puts down her burrito too.

“Words cannot describe,” he starts, “How grateful I am.”

Not at all what she expected. Not even _close_.

“What for?” she asks. He breathes out an incredulous laugh.

“You have gotten _nothing_ , nothing at all, from the— Detective, when I used to do this with my siblings, there was an expectation of _reciprocity_. And I can’t— _do that_ , for you, but you still want to…?”

He breaks off and leans in, tilts down his head and holds her gaze like he thinks he’ll be able to mojo this out of her. He phrases it like a joke, probably so that he can pretend he isn’t bothered if the answer is no.

“Detective, were you asking me before if we should schedule _grooming me_ for every _Sunday_?”

Her heart might be splitting in two. He’s lived longer than the Earth and he can’t untangle the idea that someone might just do something for him without the expectation of something in return.

“Yes,” she says pointedly, because she needs to get this in his _stupid beautiful head_. “It doesn’t have to be a Sunday, but if it’s meant to happen every week, then we’ll do it every week. That’s what you do when you care for someone, Lucifer, you do things for the other person.”

He exhales sharply. “There’s holding the door open for someone at a restaurant and then there’s having to sit there and help me get weepy and _pathetic_ for hours on end.”

They’re going to be late for work, but Chloe is going to make him figure this out if it’s the last thing she does.

“Okay, Lucifer, here’s a hypothetical. If I did have wings, would you groom them?”

He’s staring at her blankly. He can get a little harder to read when his eyes are red instead of brown, but confusion is rolling off of him in waves right now.

“ _Yes_ , but that’s exactly—”

“—And if it was the same for me as it was for you? If I had been like that?”

Lucifer opens his mouth to say something and then closes it. He taps his hand against the bar top, before gesturing it hatefully at his eyes.

“Somehow I doubt it would be like _this_ for you,” he says, voice thick with emotion.

“Lucifer. The whole thing. Swap it around. Wings, eyes, all of it. _If I had been like that_ , what would you have done?”

He stands there, dead silent, for a moment.

“I would have done it anyway,” he says quietly.

“Well, there you go, then,” she concludes. He raises the bottle back to his mouth and she can see a minute tremor in his hand. He doesn’t take that deep a drink. When he looks at her again, it’s with brown eyes. She smiles. “We on the same page now?”

“Not even remotely,” he says, but he’s smiling reluctantly, hand leaving the neck of the bottle.

Chloe checks her watch. “You’ll need to eat in the car or we’re gonna be late.”

* * *

She catches him checking his eyes on every available surface from the start of the car journey until they’re almost at the precinct. Somewhere towards the end, she spots him using the tinfoil wrapper of his finished burrito to check his face, and loses all patience.

“They’re _still brown_ , Lucifer.”

“It doesn’t hurt to be careful!”

Like he has ever lived by that a day in his life. Chloe glares at him between lane changes.

“This is exactly why I didn’t say anything last night, it just stresses you out.”

He doesn’t answer: he just balls up the tinfoil, rolls down her window, and throws it out.

She stamps the brake. “Hey!”

“What?”

“Go pick that up.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, it doesn’t _need_ picking up.”

She frowns and looks where he’s pointing. To a trash can they just passed by on his side. There’s no tinfoil anywhere to be seen. It would have been a moving target at twenty feet away. She silently pulls back onto the road and around the corner to the precinct.

“Show off,” she mutters, and he smirks.

As they pull up to the parking lot, Ella walks out from the back exit of the precinct and knocks on the passenger-side window, keys jingling in her hand. Lucifer rolls it down, head tilting.

“Good morning, Miss Lopez. Bunking off, are we? Can’t say I don’t approve.”

Ella shakes her head, nods to Chloe. “Got a call in. Dan’s texted you the address.”

Chloe digs out her phone: sure enough, Dan sent her a zip code five minutes ago. She sighs a little. “I haven’t even had coffee yet.”

“Small victories, Detective,” Lucifer says agreeably. Chloe rolls her eyes.

“Taking the van,” Ella says, swirling her keys around her finger. “See ya there.”

Chloe pulls back out of the parking lot and hands her phone to Lucifer. “Can you get us directions?”

“Certainly.” He taps at her phone. “…Hm.”

“What?”

“Left turn.”

She takes it. “Where are we going?”

“Before I tell you, I want your word you’re not going to start using any nicknames you may have recently coined in the workplace.”

Rich coming from him, but… “Okay? You have my word. Where are we going?”

“It’s an aviary.”

Chloe blinks. “You’re _kidding_.”

* * *

He’s not kidding.

The victim is face-down on his keyboard in front of an ancient-looking computer monitor, a fire axe buried in his skull. His name was ‘Sam Lionel’, and he was an exotic bird specialist. The place of death is the administrative room of the aviary, which is empty except for the vic, several hundred messy box files stacked in a corner, a giant bird cage with a macaw in it, and… well…

“We can’t turn it off just yet,” Ella explains. “His head’s on the keyboard and we haven’t finished up with securing evidence.”

The moans are pretty loud. With the glare of the overhead fluorescent bulb, it’s hard to tell exactly what porno the vic had been watching before his death, but judging from the pitch of the voices there’s at least two women involved.

Lucifer takes out his flask and drinks. Chloe can see the cogs in his head turning: he’s trying to come up with a bird pun for ‘Pornhub’. She has to kill him now before he can figure it out.

Ella grins. “Guess he was too busy on _Preenhub_ to—”

Lucifer chokes on the contents of his flask. Chloe hadn’t planned on killing Ella when she woke up this morning, but that’s life, she supposes.

“Okay!” she cuts in before her face can get any redder than it already is. Lucifer, for his part, is still coughing up whatever liquor he’d inhaled. Ella’s grinning proudly at the reaction to her joke. “Anyone else in the building at the time?”

“Nope. Their in-house vet got in early this morning for a procedure and found him. Only witness was…”

Ella points at the bird cage in the room, which is being wheeled out by two of the forensics team so they have room to remove the body. The macaw is large, blue and yellow. It’s watching the proceedings with interest.

“Ella,” Chloe says patiently, “A parrot is not a witness.”

“It’s a _talking_ parrot,” Ella says, and there’s a smile on her face like she’s gotten to the real punchline. “Apparently it doesn’t say all that much these days ‘cause it’s really old, but back in the eighties the staff taught it two _hundred_ different phrases.”

“Hmm.” Chloe frowns over at the macaw thoughtfully. Lucifer’s regained the ability to speak, although his ears have gone red.

“Judging by the company, I’d bet it can moan two hundred different ways as well.”

Chloe wishes Lucifer had not regained the ability to speak.

“I’m going to go,” she says, then remembers she needs to add in an excuse. “Talk to the vet. Lucifer, shall we—”

“Right you are,” Lucifer says, following her out of the room.

Dan’s talking to someone at the end of the corridor, and something occurs to her. “Just a moment,” she says, walking over. Lucifer waits rather than walking with her: it’s only been a few weeks since Dan found out, and while he’s not tried to shoot Lucifer since, he’s been avoiding them both where not absolutely necessary. She trusted him to take Trixie, but only once she had _ensured_ that Trixie’s ‘Find my Phone’ app was still installed and working. It’s nothing personal, she just doesn’t want Dan following in her European vacation footsteps.

“Hey,” she says. “Can we talk a mo’?”

Dan nods, finishing up his conversation with the aviary employee, eyes flicking to Lucifer at the end of the corridor. Lucifer salutes sarcastically. Lucifer still wears the crystal bracelet to work. Dan has stopped wearing his. She’s not brought it up with either of them, because this feels like something she barely understood to begin with.

“So, um,” she starts, “Is it okay if I came by for Trixie a little later on Sunday? Maybe the afternoon or evening? Lucifer and I have made plans.”

Dan’s jaw works.

“What plans?”

 _Oh, nothing much, just grooming his wings until I make him a) cry, b) come untouched, or c) both at the same time_. She clears her throat.

“It’s a date,” she says, because close enough.

Dan leans in a little, looking pained.

“Chloe, if he’s— if anything _Satanic_ is happening that you need help with, blink once.”

She glares at him. He stares at her eyes.

“Was that a blink?”

“That was a normal ‘I need to blink’ blink. Dan, he’s not going to hurt me.”

“He’s the _literal Devil_ ,” he says, loud enough for it to carry down the corridor. She turns back to Lucifer. Lucifer gives a thumbs up and nods. Dan blanches.

“Dan, can I come later on Sunday for Trixie or not?”

“Text me if anything goes wrong,” he says, which she takes as a yes, and he walks away. Chloe wanders back down to Lucifer, who’s doing an impression of someone who doesn’t care what the conversation was about.

“Does the power of Christ compel me?”

“Sunday morning’s cleared,” she says.

“…Oh.”

“What, do you have something planned?”

“ _Not anymore_ ,” Lucifer says. “Consider my morning plans well and truly gone. Kaput. Destroyed.”

She smiles up at him and he smiles confusedly down at her. Good. Maybe this good mood will distract him from what she’s about to get him to do.

Forensics have pulled the macaw cage into some kind of makeshift closet-sized meeting room: there’s nothing in here but some dilapidated chairs, a large desk, and some handbooks on avian anatomy. Chloe closes the door to the room, then opens up the macaw cage. The macaw watches them with interest. Lucifer frowns at her.

“Is there some sort of theory you’re not telling me?”

Chloe clears her throat.

“Does your mojo work the same on…”

“On what?”

“You know…” Chloe gestures awkwardly between him and the macaw.

Lucifer gapes. “Are you asking me to interrogate a parrot?”

“I’m asking if it would _work_.”

“Strangely enough, Detective, in my eons of ruling Hell, I didn’t experiment on whether or not I could _determine the desires of a bird_.”

“No time like the present,” Chloe says, raising her eyebrows.

Lucifer mutters something under his breath and bends down, staring at the macaw. Dan unfortunately chooses this moment to walk into the room behind them. Chloe _would_ tell Lucifer, if she didn’t know it would also mean he’d never try this again. She puts a finger over her lips and Dan slows to a halt, frowns at her.

Lucifer tilts his head this way and that until he’s caught the parrot’s gaze.

“What do you desire?”

The macaw cocks its head. “Pretty bird,” it says.

Lucifer straightens up. He looks at the macaw suspiciously.

“Well, I’m not sure that proves anything at all,” he says.

“She _said_ it barely talks anymore,” Chloe says. “But we should try the other birds to make sure it’s not a coincidence.”

Dan makes a high-pitched noise from the back of his throat. Lucifer startles and turns around.

“ _This_ is what you spend your time doing?” he says to Lucifer.

Lucifer swings his head around to Chloe. “Were you _planning_ at some point on telling me he was there?”

Chloe shrugs.

“Pretty bird,” the macaw adds.

Chloe’s not sure, but it seems a lot like Dan’s having an aneurysm.

“Are you kidding me,” he says in a monotone, his voice small and faint. “The Devil comes to Earth and then talks to birds. To solve crime.”

“Daniel, I’m very sorry that your crisis of faith didn’t factor in communing with parrots, but it’s _your_ crisis, not mine.” Lucifer looks like he’s having a completely separate crisis, but Chloe won’t comment.

Dan just raises up both hands and walks out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

“I feel like that was a turning point,” she says honestly. Lucifer shakes his head.

“I fear I may have fried the last of his grey matter. Let’s just—”

He turns back to the cage and cuts himself off. The macaw has hopped up onto the open door of its cage, watching them. Lucifer frowns.

“Why did you open it, again?”

Chloe frowns. “I don’t know, I just felt like we shouldn’t talk to it while it’s locked in the cage.”

“Detective, _neither of us talked to it_. It’s a parrot. I looked at it and it said some words. That doesn’t suggest I did anything at all.”

“Then we’ll test the other birds.”

Lucifer turns away and goes for the office door, eyes lifted to the heavens. “Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you aren’t going to solve a murder by t—”

The macaw doesn’t have a lot of room for its wingspan in the office, but it still manages to just about take flight, dropping down onto a chair back. Lucifer turns around and glares at it. The macaw cocks its blue head at Lucifer, rustles its yellow tail feathers.

Lucifer takes a step back. The macaw flaps onto the next closest office chair. He waves his hands at it.

“Shoo.”

The bird isn’t fazed. It hops onto the next chair forward, barely a foot from Lucifer. Looks up at his face.

“Pretty bird,” it repeats.

Lucifer goes very still. Chloe works extremely hard on not smiling.

“Lucifer,” she tries, “Is it… _possible_ , that your desire mojo has…”

“ _Do not say it_.”

“…Seduced a parrot?”

“Pretty bird,” the macaw says. Lucifer shakes his head.

“Two hundred phrases,” he scoffs. “The creature clearly knows two words and in one order, it’s just saying them over and over.”

Chloe walks over and pokes the macaw gently on its left wing. The macaw squawks but doesn’t fly away, nor take its gaze from Lucifer. She pokes it a little harder and it squawks again, turning to her.

“ _Bad_ ,” it screeches at Chloe, pecking at her retreating hand, before directing its attention back on Lucifer. “Pretty bird.”

Lucifer looks like he’s going to _explode_. Chloe should get an Oscar for how she manages to keep talking with a straight face.

“I think you’re the pretty bird, Lucifer.”

Lucifer drags his eyes from the parrot to plead with her in distress. “I am _not_ the pretty bird.”

The macaw is ruffling up its wings, spreading its tail feathers. It’s making a noise she’s heard pigeons do when chasing other pigeons in spring. It looks like it’s getting ready to _leap_. Chloe bites her lip. “I think it thinks you’re a _very_ pretty bird.”

“If I survive the next five minutes of my life, I am going to find the nearest ideal location to _drown myself_.”

“Want me to cover you here?”

“I’m going to run for the door now.”

“Okay.”

Lucifer bolts for the door. The macaw takes flight. Chloe grabs it mid-air by some stroke of blind luck, and it _screeches_. Lucifer slams the door behind him and Chloe’s now got a handful of screaming, flapping feathers.

“You get it?” Lucifer says from behind the door. Chloe feels like she’s holding an exploding bomb: the wings are flapping everywhere, the talons are currently reaching out like they want to eviscerate her, and it’s trying to bite at anything in biting range, which, if it gets its bearings, is going to be her.

“Little help?!”

The door opens and Lucifer pokes his head around.

“Fuck _me_ , that thing’s _evil_.” He comes around the side and grabs at its legs, closing his fingers around talons that would slice into anyone else. The two of them deposit it back in the cage and slam the doors shut. Chloe clicks the lock shut and it promptly flies directly into the doors, squawking.

“Thought nothing was inherently evil,” she says.

Lucifer stares darkly at the cage. “If there was ever an exception, it would be this creature.”

Chloe inspects her hands. No scratches or bites, _somehow_. Unfortunately, her hands now feel— wait, are they _oily_ again? This cannot be her life. Her face is warming up. _This cannot be her life_. She wipes her hands on her pants, which doesn’t help much, blinking up at Lucifer, who’s—

Well, at least _both_ their faces are red.

“Next time,” Lucifer says, “Don’t open the cage.”

“Damn right,” she says. The macaw is still throwing itself bodily against the cage doors. Wow, it’s persistent.

“Pretty bird,” the macaw says indignantly.

“Sorry,” Chloe says to the parrot, jamming her hands in her pockets. “ _My_ pretty bird.”

Lucifer makes a choking noise.

“I thought we agreed _no nicknames_?”

“Hey, I didn’t come up with this one.”

“I am putting a moratorium on ‘pretty bird’.”

“In the workplace.”

“In _anywhere_.”

“No deal on that.”

Lucifer makes a mouth movement that looks like the silent start of ‘what—’ before clearing his throat and leaning in.

“Exactly _where_ are you planning on using this new moniker?”

Chloe smiles.

“I’ll figure something out.”

The homicide remains unsolved by the time they leave, but Chloe cajoles and pleads until Lucifer has successfully won and broken the hearts of no less than fifteen parrots, three cockatoos and one _very_ upset kookaburra. Very little work is done. Lucifer pledges to develop a drinking problem, which is a surprising announcement considering his previous habits, and Chloe promises to make up the work in the office tomorrow.

And that’s where things just get _weird_.


	5. Wherein Chloe Does All Of The Above

The fifth time, as it slides from her head and ruffles, she can't tell where the gold silk pillow ends and his wing starts.

* * *

Lucifer's face is smushed into his pillow. His wings are splayed _everywhere_. She turns onto her back and looks up at the ceiling: reflected points of sunlight dance every time he breathes. Both wings are tilting down now, shining white-gold, warm and solid on her legs, so that he can fit them both on the bed with the end flight feathers hanging off instead of an entire right wing.

Every so often, he'll shift in his sleep and his wings will realign themselves, splay and fold. Watching them twitch in his sleep is kind of like the final puzzle piece slotting in for her. They're him, as much him as anything else. He isn't 'Lucifer with his wings out' anymore, he's just Lucifer.

She's still confused why this only started happening for him now, but she wouldn't be annoyed if it happened indefinitely.

The wings ruffle up and flutter. The 'shaking off water' motion as he wakes up finally makes sense to her; with the oil, his wings are _completely_ _waterproof_. He's shaking off water like he's slept outside with his wings for cover.

But then the wing that’s always on her head― _oh_.

She smiles helplessly at him as he blearily raises his head from the pillow.

_He's keeping her safe from the rain_.

“Good morning, Dete―mmph!”

She kisses him and he props himself onto an elbow to gain purchase, his fingers sliding into her hair. She doesn’t make any effort to break it off until he does, blinking sleepily, a smile slowly rising on one corner of his mouth.

“I was _saying_ ,” he enunciates, eyes twinkling, “Good _morning_ , Detective.”

“Good morning, Lucifer,” she replies. He raises an eyebrow at the wings taking up half the bed.

“You’d wonder why I bother with sheets at all at this point,” he grumbles. “I do promise I’m going to find out what’s causing this. I have an appointment with the Doctor on Saturday that should hopefully prove to be elucidating.”

“No rush,” she says with a smile, going back to kissing him. She winds an arm around his chest and slides her hand over his back, finding the tiny feathers between his shoulder blades and slowly drawing a finger through them, closer and closer to the base of his wing.

He freezes up. His face has gone still under hers. She blinks in shock and retreats, hand to his waist instead. He recovers quickly, nuzzles his face into her neck, gets her up and guides her to the bar for breakfast. As they get ready for the day, she catches him looking suspiciously at his eyes in the mirror, the ceiling, the reflective surface of the bar top. Chloe adds a new rule to the unspoken wing playbook. Yes, it’s necessary to touch the wings for grooming, but no handling them outside of that. Before she came into this, it wasn’t sexual, and Lucifer’s been surprised every time it’s become arousing for him. He’s either too overwhelmed by that to want it, or he doesn’t want it at all. And that is completely fine by her.

No problem.

* * *

The problem is.

The problem _is_.

When all this started, she didn’t— it wasn’t a _thing_. She knew he had wings, but it had just never occurred to her to think of them as a part of his body, something she needed to think of in any context at all.

And _look_. She had exactly one… supernatural _thing_ , before, fixation, call it what you will, with regards to Lucifer. And he doesn’t _have_ those. Improvise, adapt, overcome, and anyway, now she can’t watch Animal Planet.

Which is maybe the most embarrassing development of any relationship she’s ever been in. If she ever breaks up with Lucifer (not that she’s ever going to, she’s realised, but that’s a potential nervous breakdown for another week), she is going to have a _real_ problem trying to scratch this particular itch.

Not that she doesn’t have a _real problem_ right now. The absolute _last_ thing she is going to put on Lucifer right now is ‘hey, so glad we’re helping you work through the emotionally crippling lack of wing grooming in your life, remember when it unexpectedly made you really horny and then I—’

She is _so fucked_.

She knows she’s fucked because while she’s at _work_ , after hours but still the _workplace_ , where she should be doing _work_ , she instead gets distracted by the TV in the corner of the room. It’s supposed to play local news only but instead it’s playing that dumb parrot preening clip on Animal Planet again. It’s parrots, it’s just _parrots_ , but she can’t look at it without thinking of Lucifer arching beneath her hands. She opens up the preen oil Wikipedia page one more time (she should _not_ have it saved to her bookmarks) and scrolls down to the ‘courtship’ section that she could practically recite by heart at this point. She screenshots it, and she _almost_ texts it to Lucifer. She wants to reassure him about the whole orgasm thing ahead of Sunday, contextualise it that grooming can be a relationship thing as well as a familial thing, but then she’s struck that what she’s actually doing is using _bird Wikipedia_ to try and persuade him it’s cool to, what, what does she want from this?

_Fuck with the wings out_ , her traitorous mind suggests. She deletes the screenshot and closes the Wikipedia page and does a very good job of not loudly screaming in the office.

She goes over to the guy with the TV remote and complains at him about it playing something that isn’t local news until he flips the channel, muttering something under his breath as she retreats. She knows she just sounded pedantic and crazy but if you shouldn’t play _porn_ in the office then that guy shouldn’t―

_Oh no_. Oh no, she did _not_ just think that.

_She is so fucked_.

* * *

Turns out Ella was serious when she texted about the foam party invite, and Maze was serious when she mentioned the electrocution deaths. By about hour two of the Tribe visit to the foam party nightclub, Chloe feels like she’s simultaneously cleaner and less clean than she’s ever been before. It’s as if she’s been in a bubble bath too long, except the bubble bath is full of chemicals, flop sweat and MDMA. Her hair is stuck to her scalp like she put gum in it.

And yeah, if there’s some loose wire in the sound system then getting electrocuted seems pretty likely, but right now she needs _anything_ in her life that isn’t bird-adjacent. Dying from electrocution is a risk she’s willing to take.

Maze isn’t in Lucifer’s good books at the moment, but then she never really is, and Chloe’s given up on keeping track with the whys and whens. She doesn’t seem put out with Chloe, and Lucifer’s stopped referring to Maze outright as ‘traitorous spawn’, so she’s just letting bygones be bygones, by which Chloe currently means ‘letting Maze drink the last of her strawberry daquiri’.

Maze tips back the last of it and grimaces. “You have terrible taste in drinks, Decker.”

“Thanks, Maze.”

Ella has to leave early because of a new date. It isn’t a healthy coping mechanism for what happened, so far as Chloe sees it, but she’s not the doctor here and Linda’s not said anything about it yet. Ella gives everyone the number and address and picture of the guy and Maze casually inputs the address into her Google Maps like she’s imminently about to visit. With Ella gone, sliding her way out of the bubbly nightmare, talk slowly and inevitably turns to the newest development since the last Tribe meetup, i.e. Chloe now having sexual relations with the Devil.

This is not a conversation she would have picked to have in a loud foam-filled nightclub with two people who have _also_ had sexual relations with the Devil, but she doesn’t always get what she wants in life. They’re mostly taking this as an opportunity to talk about their own experiences with Lucifer, which, again, not what she would have picked for her night out. When she is very specifically trying _not_ to think about certain aspects of her and Lucifer’s relationship.

But she’s a little too drunk to stop them and they’re a little too drunk to be stopped, so now here they are.

“He does sort of _drown himself_ down there,” Linda muses, twiddling her straw in her hand. Chloe is honor-bound to nod in agreement, because, yeah, accurate. Maze snorts.

“Yeah, maybe with mortals. Call me when he gets the chains back out.”

Chloe can feel one of her eyes twitching at that. “Yeah, uh, no. Not happening. No chains. Will not be calling. Thanks.”

Linda laughs. “Oh-h, come on! He’s the _Devil_! You can’t tell me there’s no, you know, _weird_ stuff he’s doing with you?”

Maze leans in. “Yeah, are you two _really_ just doing missionary all night? _Come on_.”

“Come on,” Linda reiterates. They’re both now leaning across the table. Chloe really wished this conversation had continued to just be them talking about their own sexual encounters with her new boyfriend, because somehow this is actually worse.

“Pleading the fifth,” Chloe announces. She still feels like she’s somehow admitted too much. Maze and Linda groan dramatically.

“You’re not gonna tell us anything?” Maze says. “What are friends for if not _exactly_ this?”

“We’re coming _right back_ ,” Linda says, “And we are getting the _truth_.” She looks meaningfully at Maze, who snickers and follows Linda to the bathroom. Great, now they’re going to figure out some sort of weird plan to needle the truth out of her. They’re maybe the worst combined force in the universe.

The foam machine is going off again on the main floor. She watches blandly from the balcony as people cover themselves in blue-tinted chemical soap, sliding around on the floor like coked up newborn foals. Her head’s gone off to a whole new place again.

She’s had a little while to get around to the concept that she’s the only human who doesn’t see Lucifer as a personification of their own desires. Still, all of _this_ has just brought that crashing back into view. Maze and Lucifer had whatever they had with no desire mojo involved, but the lack of connection was mutual, and Maze isn’t exactly one for reflecting on the deep-set desires of her sexual partners. Everyone human she’s known to have been with Lucifer… it’s the same story again and again. Even from Linda, who knows Lucifer’s life as well if not better than she does. Chloe probably still has the notebooks from when she’d interviewed all his sexual partners, and it’s exactly the same as Linda just said. Great sex, Lucifer does X unusually impressive thing, it’s great. He finds out what you truly desire, and he hands you it on a plate.

She _wants_ to tell them, _yeah, but have you seen what he looks like when he gets to have something he desires?_ She wants to shake them until they _see_ it, the thing nobody but her apparently sees, the man hiding beneath the mirror they’ve all erected to their own interests. Lucifer’s so desperate to be seen that he almost can’t handle the attention once he gets it.

She’s so wrapped up in this that she almost doesn’t notice her phone is beeping over and over.

The texts are from Maze, five minutes ago. Her mouth goes dry.

The bathroom is only thirty feet away, but the music was so loud she hadn’t even _heard_ Linda scream. Maze explains with the professional detachment of a once-pro torturer, as Chloe slides around on the melting ice-slick foam that’s _everywhere_ in the bathroom, that Linda had managed to slip over, catch her arm in the giant dramatic pipes the nightclub had put around the sinks, and snap her arm so bad she’d thrown up and passed out simultaneously. Thank _someone_ that Maze had gone with her. Linda’s conscious again when Chloe arrives but, you know, she’s bleeding and can see a bone sticking out of her arm, so she’s not exactly a font of witty repartee.

“ _Fuck!_ ” Linda yells, cradling her arm where Maze has torn up her dress to form a haphazard sling. Maze doesn’t look up from her phone.

“You’ve already said that twice,” Maze says. She’s got a level tone, but she’s chewing her lip anxiously.

“We need to go to a hospital,” Chloe says, kneeling down in front of Linda. Linda shakes her head rapidly, nods at Maze tapping at speed on her phone.

“Amenadiel c’n heal it,” Linda says. “Or Lucifer. Saves on hospital bills. ‘N it’s faster.” She looks pale, like she might throw up again, but instead her face just screws up in confusion. “How’d I get to a point in my life where it’s easier to get the Devil to heal me than to just fork out the co-pay?”

Chloe always forgets that healing is one of the things angels can do. At this point she really is going to write that Google Doc just to keep track. _Can heal wounds. Can stop time. Can seduce a large macaw._

Maze is glaring down at her phone screen. “Neither of them’re answering. Fuckers. Should have ripped out more feathers when I had the chance, everyone up here gets broken so _easily_. Decker, you’re fucking Lucifer, can’t you get him on the phone?”

“Oh!” Chloe says, eyes widening. “Just the feathers― the _feathers_ will do it?”

Maze frowns. “Yeah?”

Chloe digs in her purse with fumbling soapy fingers and drags out her wallet, flips through the laminate pockets until she gets to the slightly battered white feather. She pulls it out and proffers it. Linda and Maze stare at it.

“You steal his feathers?” Maze says, slowly starting to smile. “Didn’t know you had it in you, Decker.”

“No, it’s not… it’s a long story. He kind of jammed it in my mouth, okay? I don’t _steal_ his feathers.”

Maze blinks, which is unusual for Maze. “He jammed it into your mouth.”

“It’s _not_ a sex thing,” she says, trying to keep her voice level.

“Oh-kay!” Linda interrupts, her voice starting to pitch to a new level of subsonic. “Shall we move on? You know, _to the broken arm that I have_?”

“Oh, right.” Maze takes the feather and lays it directly on the bone sticking out of Linda’s arm. The downy barbs stick to the blood and flicker, light travelling along the surface. The low light of the nightclub bathroom gets darker, bulbs fading to red embers of electrical light. Lucifer’s feathers absorb light. Okay. New piece of information for that document she’s already mentally designing.

The feather’s golden glow swells and expands to the whole of Linda’s arm, enveloping her in light. Linda yelps. The nightclub lightbulbs go entirely out, the feather stops glowing, and they’re plunged into darkness.

Flickering from red to yellow, the bulbs come back on. The feather’s gone, and Linda’s arm is completely fine. Linda squints down at her healed arm in confusion, untying the sling and experimentally flexing it.

“I think that thing burned off my arm hair.”

“Amen,” Chloe says.

* * *

When Chloe gets back, Lucifer accurately sums up her foam party experience by chuckling and gesturing up and down at her with the glass in his hand.

“Did you spend the night rolling on the floor?” Then his eyes widen and he leans over the bar. “Is that blood?”

Chloe glances down at herself. Oh damn, she’s _covered_. Why didn’t her Uber driver kick her out? She knows this is L.A., but there has to be a line somewhere in the terms and conditions about suspecting your passenger of being a serial killer.

She drops her purse on the ground and walks direct for the bathroom. “Explain in a moment. I need to be clean _yesterday_.”

“It’s not your blood, is it?”

Behind her, she can hear Lucifer following her up, his voice uncertain. She turns: his eyes have that nervous cast to them again, like there’s a reflective crimson layer beneath the surface. May as well give him the CliffsNotes or he’s going to follow her the whole way into the shower to make sure she’s not cut.

“No, Linda tripped and broke her arm.”

Lucifer puts his glass down, plunges his hand in his pocket for his phone. “Is she alright?”

“Yeah, we, uh― we couldn’t reach you or Amenadiel so we…” Is this going to freak him out? Fuck, she hopes not. “We used one of your feathers to heal it.”

Lucifer’s expression goes dark. The crimson cast to his eyes becomes a steady glow. “Traitorous creature. I _knew_ she must have taken more.”

“No, no, no, it― I had it.” He tilts his head, eyes narrowing again, and now she’s going to need to kick this explanation into overdrive, she should have said something _weeks_ ago. “The― when you first woke me up with your wings? And one, uh, ended up in my mouth? I may have, um, put it in my wallet.”

Lucifer doesn’t look mad anymore, the red glow receding, but he doesn’t look like― like he’s getting it. He picks his glass back up and sips, frowning. “If you wanted one for these sorts of emergencies, all you had to do was ask.”

“I didn’t know they did that ‘til tonight! Linda’s arm went from _snapped_ to normal, it was―” she cuts herself off, thinking. Maybe she ought to ask for another. If it heals _anything_ … Could be a good thing for safekeeping, when he’s not around. Maybe she should ask him if Trixie could have one.

Lucifer cuts in. “Just a moment, you didn’t know they could heal injuries and you were keeping it in your wallet _why_ , exactly?”

“I―” she may as well explain this too or he’s not going to drop it. Even if it makes her look like the feather-obsessed psycho that she is. She nods her head back to the elevator, walks them back to the soapy purse on the floor, picks it up and hands him her wallet. “I was keeping it in one of the pockets. Just as a― well, you can see the other ones.”

Lucifer deposits his glass on his piano so he can rifle through the laminate pockets. His frown is slowly lifting. She knows what she has in there. Mostly Trixie. A picture of the Tribe when Ella had jammed them all into a photo booth; Chloe’s frowning at the lens, but everyone else looks nice. Lucifer doesn’t stand still for a photograph when he’s not doing something carnal to it, but sometimes he sends selfies with weird or gruesome objects, and she’d gotten one printed for her wallet with the large car fire mostly cropped out of the shot. She can see him pause on that one, then pause for even longer at the empty laminate pocket she’d kept the feather in, next to the one of Trixie in her Halloween costume.

“So it was a… keepsake?” he tries.

“Yeah, pretty much. Sorry I didn’t ask.”

“That’s fine,” he says, looking down at the wallet one more time before handing it back. He schools his expression into something bright and relaxed. “I’m glad it proved useful to you.”

That’s a _weird_ answer, and she might ask him later what exactly he thinks keepsakes are if he thinks they’re supposed to just be pragmatic, but right now she has never wanted to be clean more in her life. She goes to nudge him aside and he sidesteps neatly, lets her pass.

“I’m showering now,” she insists, and he nods.

“Certainly for the best, Detective, I think I’ve met cleaner raccoons.”

Just for that, she yanks her tank top off, balls it up, turns, and throws at him. He dodges effortlessly, of course, but his revulsion as it splats to the ground at his feet is enough to satisfy her.

“Watch the Armani!”

“Pfft. Didn’t you use the Armani as a towel a couple nights ago?”

As she wanders away, there’s a confused pause, before an indignant reply.

“That was from _Gieves and Hawkes_ , and the damnable people still can’t get the oil stains out!”

“What’d you tell them it was?” she yells from the walk-in closet, picking out some loose sweatpants and an old band shirt. Lucifer yells back with a note of frustration.

“I’ve visited that shop _personally_ for _two hundred years_ and I have always told them _exactly_ what fluid I need removing from their handiwork!”

Chloe’s getting good at hearing the evasions.

“And _this time?”_

In the ensuing pause, she can almost imagine him downing the last of his drink.

“I _mailed_ it to them.”

She smirks, strips down and throws everything in the laundry chute before wandering back out and to the bathroom. Lucifer watches her go by from the piano bench, salutes her nakedness with a raised bottle. She can hear him playing from the shower, the notes wobbling and distorting in the water. Something classical. She’s heard Mozart enough to know it’s definitely not Mozart. It’s vaguely familiar, but she can’t place it over the sound of his probably-illegal-in-the-state-of-California-high-pressure shower.

She emerges clean and boringly dressed, but his eyes fix on her as she wanders over, towelling off the ends of her hair. He switches songs abruptly to something else.

“Wait,” she says. “What was that last one?”

Lucifer starts the familiar part of the first song again. She frowns. She _definitely_ knows it from something.

“Come now, Detective,” Lucifer says as his hands dance effortlessly across the keyboard. “Where’s your training in musical Devil worship?”

“Really?”

“In a sense.” He pauses and then starts it again, but only hits the first chord. Something weird and dissonant. He hits the chord again. “’Diabolus in Musica’. You couldn’t _imagine_ the complaints a sixteenth-century Church could wield on a hapless composer wanting to have a go at that tritone. Unbelievable, the number of things ascribed to my influence. The _goats_. If the person who came up with the goat thing isn’t in Hell, I don’t know who is.”

He starts the song up again, looks at her. “No? No guesses?”

Chloe blinks. “―Oh! Yeah! Danse Macabre. It’s in the theme for that show.”

“Which one?”

Chloe abruptly remembers two things at once: the time Lucifer watched all of ‘Bones’ in a weekend, and the plot of ‘Jonathan Creek’. The show about an eccentric civilian consultant solving unusual murder cases.

“Not important,” she says. Lucifer doesn’t pry.

“Now that we’ve solved that mystery, Detective, how about this one?” He begins playing the song she cut off earlier. This one she can get without too much effort: he’s clearly recognised her band shirt. It doesn’t translate perfectly to piano, but Lucifer’s been playing for a couple hundred years, so he’s not exactly _bad_ at transcription.

She smiles. “‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’.”

He smiles back at her, flicks his eyes down to the piano. She leans against it, keeps towelling her hair dry as he plays. He glances up midway through the chorus.

“I imagine this was the bird joke you were hinting at.”

Is he seeing bird stuff everywhere too now? This is even worse than the ‘Animal Planet’ thing, arguably, because it’s a generic band shirt and it doesn’t have a single bird reference on it.

_Except it’s not worse_ , that traitorous voice in her head pitches in, _because he’s talking about the annoying bird jokes you make about his wings, and you’re thinking about the birds that keep reminding you of how badly you want to fuck around with his wings. When he’s. Not. Interested._

“Nope,” she says. “Just a shirt. No bird jokes tonight.”

“Not even one? You wound me, Detective, I’ve come to think of it as a sign of your affection.”

Her poker face is clearly lacking, because her best attempt to seem nonchalant at that _bonkers close to the wing thing_ statement seems to have fallen flat. Lucifer tilts his head, half a smile on his face.

“There we are. You’ve got one, haven’t you? Go on.”

“No bird jokes tonight,” she insists. She feels hot. It’s hot in here. “Oh hey, did they finish the balcony?”

Lucifer grimaces. “If by ‘finish’ you mean that they’ve stopped and I’ve paid them, yes, they’ve finished.” He stands from the piano and leads them out.

For the last few days, Lucifer and herself left for work just as the cleaning crews came in, and vice versa in the evenings. Lucifer’s been covering for his own embarrassment each time by complaining to her at length about the pervasive smell of cleaning products before drinking anxiously from his flask. The balcony no longer smells of bleach and chemicals, but it’s also not… well, clean. The furniture’s all been replaced, the feathers are gone, and the glass and steel structures have cleaned off just fine, but here and there are dark spots on the concrete floor of the balcony that, when the light catches them, shine like gloss.

Lucifer looks down in frustration, scuffing at one of them with the toe of his shoe.

“I’ll have to get it redone,” he says.

“We should put towels down next time.” Chloe’s face isn’t slowly turning a shade of crimson. Not at all. Why did she think this was a good idea for an evasion?

“Maybe a tarp,” Lucifer sighs, and _that_ statement doesn’t travel anywhere it shouldn’t. _Not at all_. He looks over abruptly at her hair. “Detective, your hair’s still wet.”

Instead of the answer she wants to automatically give to his question, which is ‘that’s not the only thing’, Chloe instead takes the excuse for a new topic of conversation. She jumps on it so eagerly, she’s surprised he doesn’t step backwards and yell ‘wing fetishist! wing fetishist!!’ at her.

“ _Yes_ , it uh, takes a while. Couldn’t be bothered with the hairdryer tonight, so, y’know. Towel.” She holds it up for demonstration, like he doesn’t know what a towel is.

Lucifer’s looking at her weirdly. She has to forcibly remind herself that he can’t find out what her desires are. She really, really hopes. The mojo thing has been all over the place recently. He had it, then she had it, then he had it again… Maybe she’s just broadcasting _I want to grab your wings and make you come_ over and over in his head. Oh no she really hopes not. Lucifer’s still staring. Talk. _Talk_ , Decker.

Lucifer gets there first.

“Detective, I know we spoke about reciprocity a few days ago…”

_Oh no_.

“…And I know you made your opinion clear, but I would like to― naturally, Detective, it’s not the same, but if you’d wish it, could I… do something in return?”

He’s stilted and uncertain, but his hand comes up to curl around a lock of her hair. She retreats from Horny DEFCON 1. He’s not calling her out. He’s doing something really sweet. She smiles automatically, and he looks relieved.

“Yeah, of course, that’d be… that’d be really nice.”

Of course, because he’s Lucifer, he finds a way to make it not-really-sweet, which is to go into the bathroom and rip into every haircare product she owns. He sits on the couch with her, plucking hair from the bristles of her round brush and setting it down on the glass table with an air of fastidious distaste.

“Are you collecting it to keep the child warm in the winter?”

She rolls her eyes. “It brushes just fine with or without hair in it.”

“I’d beg to differ.” He inspects the dent he’s made in the small nest of hair caught in the bristles of her round brush and shakes his head, standing up and going back to the bathroom. She hears a clatter that sounds _suspiciously_ like―

“Did you just throw my hairbrush in the trash?!”

“I’ll buy you one that works!”

“It _does_ work!”

Lucifer emerges with a large zip pouch, laying it on the table next to the clumps of hair he’d taken from the brush. He unzips it and pulls out a small _arsenal_. It’s like someone daylight robbed a salon. A salon that silver plates and monograms the handles of their combs.

He looks up at her incredulous expression and gestures to his own hair. “Keeping this in order would be a full-time job for the average mortal.”

That is absolutely, categorically not true, at _most_ he has to straighten and gel it, but for the sake of keeping the peace she doesn’t start an argument about it, rolling her eyes instead. He picks up a round brush that looks concerningly expensive for what it is. It’s as-if-he-bought-it-yesterday clean. He lifts the brush to her hair and slowly starts working.

It takes him a few minutes to get the feel of it. At first, he’s way too rough, the bristles of the brush digging into her scalp, tugging too hard. She’s reminded of Dan trying to brush Trixie’s hair when she was younger, and the inevitable complaints and wriggling as he’d yanked it too hard into her ever-tangled hair. It doesn’t take long, though, for Lucifer to adjust to any wincing and scrunched-up eyes on her part by going slowly and gently, on occasion finger-combing his way through the hair before adding the brush. By the time he’s combed the wet hair straight and detangled it, the movement is soothing.

He sets it aside and gestures for her to turn around. She shifts on the couch, puts her back to him and looks to the bar. His fingers start at her temple and sweep back, pulling strands of hair over her ears, laying them gently down her back. It’s silent between them, still and taut in the air; it’s as if he’s holding back from saying something. He’s slow and meticulous, hands smoothing from her forehead to the small of her back in long careful strokes.

When Lucifer starts working on the braid, something changes in his demeanour. The brushing and laying out of her hair had been done in a way that felt, for him, a little formal. Here, he begins to pick up speed and gain in fluidity. He seems to know exactly where he’s going, not that she can pick up any clues at all from how he seems to be portioning and twisting her hair. The careful arm’s length he’d kept between them slowly vanishes. He leans into her, his warmth palpable against the thin material of her shirt. His lips come to rest on the nape of her neck, curve to a smile against her as she laughs in surprise. There’s still no talking, but now it’s comfortable: it doesn’t feel like he’s holding back anymore, but simply that he has nothing to say.

She hadn’t noticed her hands were wringing together in her lap until he leans over her and puts a hand in hers to still them. She’s not used to sitting still: a trait they admittedly share. She has patience, it’s not Lucifer’s particular brand of impulsive dynamo movement, but she’s never been happy with taking time to herself. Right now, he’s taking it for her, and so she’s letting him, but her body hasn’t exactly caught up to the idea. Her hands are conditioned for an endless day of work and eventful action, punctuated only by sleep. They don’t know what to do with silence.

His hand is warm and slightly damp from her hair. She squeezes it, running her thumb over the knuckles, and it retreats to her back, returning to its ministrations. She knits her fingers together and starts up a pattern of brushing one thumb over the knuckle of her other thumb, swap thumbs, repeat. He braids her hair slowly, quiet enough that all she can hear is the thrum of Lux’ dance music and their own steady breathing.

It’s not sexual. He doesn’t pull at her hair or try to wind a hand down to her sweatpants while he works. He interrupts with kisses, gentle touches, wordless reassurance every time she gets antsy, but it’s the furthest possible thing from the overstimulated mess she keeps making of him every time she grooms him. Is this what it ought to be like? Is this what he wants it to be like? She’s done such a bad job. Everything he does is about desire apart from this _one_ thing he did for family bonding, and she’s gone and made it kinky. She’s such an asshole.

He seems to notice she’s tensing up, because his hands briefly migrate to her shoulders, thumbs rubbing slowly against her back.

“Almost done,” he murmurs. She nods.

When he’s finished, he seals his work with a kiss to the back of her head that she can scarcely feel through the braiding.

“Can I look?” she asks.

“Go ahead.” He hands her a hand mirror so she can check the back properly in the bathroom mirror.

She’s surprised with what she finds when she gets to the bathroom. In all honesty, she’d kind of expected a pentagram. Instead, he’s carefully braided her hair neatly and professionally, close to the scalp without pulling too hard, winding it around the back of the head to finish with a bun that’s pulled out in segments to look subtly like a flower.

It’s the sort of hairstyle you only get when you have a wedding to be the bridesmaid at and the bride paid for a professional to do your hair. It looks like the sort of thing you’d see on Pinterest and never bother to try. Maybe it _is_ the sort of thing you see on Pinterest. Did he Google ahead of time? Did he _practice_? Short of some _really_ sappy rope bondage, she’s not sure what cause he would have had to do this before.

Lucifer’s leaning against the doorframe. She turns to him. He’s got that tiny subtle smile on his face, the one she’s only seen him use with her. She smiles back. She knows she’s got to be looking pretty sappy herself.

“Thank you.”

He waves it off like it’s nothing. “It’s not exactly repayment, but then if I’m not mistaken, your point was that I’m not strictly repaying you.”

“It is.” After that, she’s pretty sure that she’s done nothing for him that deserves repayment. “Thank you. That was… _really_ nice. It looks really _good_. Where’d you learn to do this?”

“The Devil has his ways,” Lucifer tries, and she looks at him until he relents. “Fine, YouTube.”

He _did_ look it up first. He’d _planned_ for this.

She crosses the bathroom and hugs him. He rests his chin gently on the work he’s created. She picks the first words that come to mind, because she knows they’re the right ones to say to him out loud.

“You’re such a good man.”

Lucifer doesn’t respond for a long time.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I know you wouldn’t, that’s why I’m saying it.”

He doesn’t answer; he just pulls her to bed. The sex is gentle and unhurried. For once, neither of them talks. He traces one finger gently around the spiral of the braid when they’re done, and she holds him as close as she can. She pledges that she won’t ruin Sunday for him.

* * *

When paying for coffee the next morning, the braid a little looser but still mostly intact, she ends up staring dumbly at her wallet for maybe three seconds before she can get herself together enough to dig out her debit card.

There’s a gold reflective gleam coming from the inside of her folded-up laminate pockets. She goes into the Starbucks restroom just for somewhere to open up her wallet properly and check.

It’s one of the small downy feathers again, but brushed smooth and silky instead of the ruffed-up unpreened feather she’d had before. In the flickering fluorescent bulb of the Starbucks restroom, the glassy white surface has a gentle cast of swirling Rorschach gold. The calamus of the last feather (she really wished she didn’t know all these words now) had been dull at the point, but this one looks as sharp as a quill pen.

Almost as if, instead of the feather shedding naturally, it had been pulled from the wing.

This is purely a sweet gesture. She needs to think of it as only the sweet gesture that it is.

She can’t stop thinking that she’s the one that painted it gold. The sounds he had made as her thumb had made contact with his preen gland. His sigh as she’d smoothed her hand over the arch of his wing.

If she can ever get a break on all the stupid _bird_ stuff, maybe she can turn herself around.

* * *

There’s not even a break on the bird stuff on the _weekend_. The aviary case is turning into a nightmare she can’t escape. She’s only been working on it for a few _days_.

None of them got around to interviewing the vet who had first found the victim. Dan was mid-interview at the aviary when she distracted him by mentioning the Devil in the room, and then she and Lucifer had experimented with bird seduction until they’d run out of time, so they’re visiting to follow up. Really, Dan should be the one to follow up, but Lucifer insisted during the meeting and Dan had looked too nervous to complain. She thinks this may be Lucifer’s attempt at making amends, but she really has no idea.

So now they’re going to the vet’s office at his private practice. On Saturday afternoon, of all times to be working on this stupid case, because that’s the only time he’s got where he’s not actively doing surgery.

The practice. For a bird vet. You know, where _birds_ are.

Chloe’s life is a sick joke. God had a hand in her conception so maybe he’s got a hand in this, too. _Alas, my child, you may have started dating the Devil as intended but now you also have a wing fixation so let me punish you via bird-themed murder parables._ Or something. She had literally no idea what kind of ‘mysterious ways’ sort of thinking would have to happen for Him to lead her life here.

Lucifer comes direct from his morning session with Linda. He doesn’t say anything other than to say that yes, the feather did singe her arm hair off, but yes, her arm is still fine. He seems pretty comfortable, so she hopes everything went well with discussing the wing stuff.

She hopes so mostly because she’s about to plunge him― well, _both_ of them― into wing central.

It’s an exotic veterinary practice, so it’s not only birds. The guy they’re here to see, Tim, is a bird specialist, but several people come past with capuchins before they’ve even sat down in the waiting room. One person has an iguana. This is all fine until someone comes past with a snow-white dove in a large cage partially covered with a blanket, and Chloe literally has to _look away_ , because this is what her life has become.

A harried-looking man with balding hair wanders into the waiting room. “Detective Decker?”

She stands up. “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m sorry to be taking up more of your time. This is my partner, Lucifer Morningstar.”

She’s gotten used to ignoring the resultant patter; _really, yes, god given I’m afraid,_ and so on that sustains the conversation over to Tim’s office.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Tim says, holding open the door, “But I happen to be with one of my regulars right now. He doesn’t have any owner with him, he’s one of the aviary birds, so there’s nobody but us and the parrot.”

Lucifer stops still in the doorway, blocking exit or entry. He looks very hard at Tim.

“Large, blue, likes to say mind-numbingly inane phrases?”

Tim grins. “You’ve met.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Lucifer mutters.

The macaw screeches the _second_ they enter the room.

“Pretty bird!” it yells, pecking the locked door of its travel cage. Chloe bites her tongue hard. Tim laughs in surprise.

“That’s an unusual one,” Tim says. “He must really like you two. I get a lot of ‘hello’, the sound of a telephone… the Addams Family theme tune if he’s in a good mood. He usually only goes for ‘pretty bird’ during mating season.”

Chloe nods, schooling her face to something professional. Lucifer’s going an unusual shade of red that has nothing to do with his Devil face.

“And what would this feathered rat be named?” he asks pleasantly.

Tim coughs nervously.

“Well, as blue-and-gold macaws go, he’s uncommonly large―”

_There’s no way_. Lucifer seems to be preparing to jump out of the window.

“―So they called him ‘Big Bird.”

Chloe stares resolutely at a place somewhere to the left of Tim’s face. Lucifer is entirely silent beside her. Neither of them say anything. Tim clears his throat uncomfortably.

“If you’re familiar with Sesame Street―”

“―Yes, I know what Big Bird is,” Lucifer says in a way that makes him sound like he’s taking off into space.

“Yeah, yup,” Chloe adds in uselessly. “So, uh, do you think that there’s any chance that― Big Bird― will be able to tell us who the murderer was?”

Tim blinks.

“Detective Decker, Big Bird is a macaw. Parrots are smart, but I’m afraid they don’t answer direct questions.”

“Don’t they?” Lucifer says, going for his flask. Tim blinks again.

“ _No_ , they don’t.”

Great. Lucifer’s about to drink in front of the witness, and she’s burned her last brain cells out trying not to think about wing sex. This is a disaster. Chloe rattles through the interview questions while not-so-subtly jamming Lucifer’s flask back inside his jacket. Tim’s alibi checks out, everything about this seems pretty much like a formality.

Then something occurs to her. And she really wishes it hadn’t, because now she has to pursue it to the bitter and unfortunate end.

“Have you examined Big Bird yet?” she asks.

“No, I haven’t. Why do you ask?”

“He was in the same room as Mr Lionel, and… I don’t think forensics... Is there any chance we could inspect him while you’re present? Given the state of the crime scene, there could be DNA evidence on the feathers.”

She keeps looking at Tim. She does not look over at Lucifer. Lucifer has turned his entire body to her and is staring a _hole_ into her. Tim shifts uncomfortably.

“Oh. Yes, that… I hadn’t considered that. It’s good you came. Yes, we can check.”

“I’m going to wait outside,” Lucifer announces. Chloe shakes her head. She really, _really_ wishes she could do this another way, but…

“He needs to inspect Big Bird and I need to check the feathers, so you need to hold him.”

“ _Excuse me_?”

Lucifer ends up with some large thick gloves. Tim says they’re for the talons, and Lucifer opines it’s his best chance at contraception. Chloe receives some thin latex gloves, and tries _very_ hard to think about what she’s about to do with a professional mindset.

_This is a bird. This is not your boyfriend. The fact that they both have wings is entirely incidental_.

Tim opens up the cage and Lucifer grabs Big Bird’s legs before he can take flight. Big Bird squawks, trying to flap his body fully into Lucifer’s arm.

“Pretty bird! Pretty bird!”

“I am _absolutely_ not,” Lucifer snaps at the macaw, holding it upright. Tim looks more uncomfortable than before, and frankly Chloe had thought they’d hit a limit at some point. The vet gently begins to begin the examination. Big Bird is making an up-and-down motion that Chloe is not going to ask about.

“You’re very excited, aren’t you?” Tim murmurs to the macaw, writing something down on a notebook. Lucifer blanches. Chloe clears her throat.

“Okay, so if I can just―”

“Go right ahead, Detective.”

She’s looking for blood, or foreign objects, or something suspicious. She’s not going to hold them just to hold them. There is an _intent_ here. A _job_.

Big Bird is still doing that up-and-down motion in Lucifer’s hands. He starts whistling. It takes a couple bars for her to figure it out, but it’s…

“There you are,” Tim says. “The Addams Family theme tune. Must be in a good mood today.”

“It’s getting everything it desires,” Chloe mutters under her breath to Lucifer as Tim checks Big Bird’s eyes and turns to his computer to tap something into a document. Lucifer glares at her, voice hushed and desperate. Big Bird is still making weird… motions, in his hands.

“I’m _so glad_ my Father gave _me_ the power of bird desire and gave _it_ Celestial bloody limbs, but if you’d like to _get this over with_ ―”

Chloe takes Big Bird’s left wing in her hands. It’s squawking uncomfortably, but it’s being held still by Lucifer, and she slowly draws out the wing to full stretch.

Why is the wing so _similar_? Chloe is going to go to church and _lodge a formal complaint_.

Long flight feathers, short downy feathers at the top, a long arch of bone and fluff at the top. Chloe traces one finger gently over the arch before she even realises what she’s doing is going to do exactly _nothing_ for the investigation. She glances up at Lucifer, who’s―

Well, he’s not looking at the bird anymore.

_Fuck_.

Chloe clears her throat and continues. Her face is so red. Lucifer _can’t_ have missed it. The left wing’s fine. She crosses to the right wing, stretches it out and inspects.

“There,” she says, beckoning Tim over. There’s something on one of the shorter feathers on the outside that looks wrong. “One of the feathers is stained.” She’s not sure with what; it doesn’t look like blood. It’s matted the barbs out of place.

Tim frowns. “That’s a good spot, Detective. Do you own a bird yourself?”

She’s going to die here. She’s going to die holding a parrot. She thought she had so much to live for. Lucifer is still _staring at her face_.

“Not own, exactly,” she mutters.

“Is this going to be important for your investigation?”

“Can’t rule it out. If there was a struggle, it could be DNA of the killer.”

“It’s not one of the flight feathers, but I’m afraid he might not appreciate this. Can you hold his wing out― carefully― okay―”

The feather comes out without any struggle. Tim holds it in his hand.

“Must’ve been damaged,” Chloe says. Tim shrugs.

“Or it’s moulting out of season.”

Lucifer deposits the macaw promptly into the travel cage, slamming the door shut. The macaw doesn’t go to attack or squawk: it looks pretty happy, actually.

Chloe looks down at her hands. The gloves are oily. This sight shouldn’t be giving her _any reaction at all_. She takes the gloves off carefully but she _still_ ends up with oil on her hands and wiping it off on her pants doesn’t do anything at all to get rid of the sticking feeling of residue.

She finally risks looking back up at Lucifer. Lucifer is staring at her. There’s the edge of something in that stare. It’s the look he gets when he’s successfully mojo’d something out of someone.

_Oh fuck_.

Tim sends them away with a macaw feather in a plastic baggy, which Chloe shoves in her bag. Her face is still red. Her face is still _so red_. She’d hoped she could distract Lucifer with some kind of comment on the homicide but instead he takes her by the arm and _drags her into an empty office_.

She clears her throat, crosses her arms. “What?”

The look on his face is positively gleeful. She’s going to make this case a double homicide. Lucifer leans down and says the magic words with absolute point-blank certainty.

“You’ve got a _wing fetish_!”

“It is _not_ ,” she snaps, hoping against hope she can sell this with anger, “a _fetish_.”

“It _is_! Detective, this is _brilliant_ news!”

She blinks. Her brain is stalling. “It is?”

She searches his expression for doubt or uncertainty, and finds none. He grins.

"Yes, it’s perfect! At least now you'll be getting something _out_ of Sunday."

No. _No_ , wait, _no way_. What?! She is going to _throttle him_. If he takes away from this stupid revelation that the wing grooming is fine just because she has a thing for his wings now, she's going to lose it. This is _not_ transactional just because she’s _kinky_.

"It is _not_ perfect at _all_. Lucifer, I’m not doing this because I like _them_ , I’m doing this because I like _you_.”

He’s starting to lose her; his head’s tilting. “…Well, good for you, they’re part of me, so it’s all one and the same.”

“It’s not! In one of those scenarios, I’m just doing it to… to _get off_ , like I want to get something _out_ of it, and in the other I’m doing it because I _love you_ and I want you to _feel loved_. And I do _not_ come first here, not with this.”

His face has gone still again. The same as when she’d kissed him while trailing her hand through his feathers. Like his brain’s gone into blue-screen-of-death mode.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says. He’s looking at her like she just landed from Mars and she’s _so mad at herself_.

“Yeah, _oh_ ,” she says. “I’m so sorry I’ve gotten weird about it, it’s really not... I can be _normal_ about this, Lucifer. I promise you I’m going to just… do Sunday exactly as you want it to be, okay? Like you did with my hair.”

If he still wants to do Sunday. She really hopes she hasn’t fucked this whole thing up for him.

Lucifer twists the ring on his finger. He picks over every word carefully. That still expression is still playing across his face, flashing strangely in his eyes.

“Detective, I had an… illuminating conversation this morning with Doctor Martin. Her theory about why I keep manifesting my wings in my sleep was that… that because we’re _together_ , now, I want to show you parts of myself that other people _haven’t_ seen.” He fixes his eyes on her. His expression is far too open and genuine for anyone standing in an exotic vet’s office. “That I’m showing you my wings in the mornings because I’m subconsciously testing if it will make you run.”

Chloe feels absolutely poleaxed. _He thought the wings_ ―

Oh. _Well_. How have her reactions to his other supernatural looks gone?

_Shit_. No wonder he’s been so panicked.

“I’m not running,” she says firmly.

“I know,” he says. His certainty even seems to surprise _him_ , he takes a moment just to get back on track. It certainly surprises her. Something warm is swelling in her heart at his declaration of trust. “I know that now. I thought at best that you’d tolerate them, but I… Detective, I thought I’d demonstrated embarrassingly enough my own interest in… it’s not _just_ you that likes this. I suppose is what I’m saying.”

“Oh,” she says.

“Yes, _oh_ ,” he says.

“I thought because you said it never happened before like that―”

“Yes, again, it wasn’t ‘ _bad_ _different’_.”

“A-and you seemed really uncomfortable about― when I kissed you that morning, last time―”

“Yes, might have been because I was having a little struggle trying to _keep any blood in my head_.”

“ _Oh_.”

“Yes, _oh_.” Lucifer looks vaguely embarrassed again, but now she can pinpoint the look as him being _embarrassed about being into it_. _Like she is_. Okay, _fuck_. She can work with this. For the first time in maybe all of human history, Lucifer’s slightly awkward about something he’s turned on by, but she’s into the exact same thing so this is going to be _fine_. Holy shit thank anyone _that isn’t his actual dad_ for that.

“You know,” she says, “I also figured something out.”

“What’s that?”

“You keep putting the wings on my head, right?”

Lucifer grimaces. “Yes, the good doctor didn’t have any particular solution to that mystery, I’m afraid.”

“With the oil, they’re waterproof, right? So you can sleep with them over you?”

He gets with the picture pretty quickly. The smile on his face is small and genuine.

“Ah-h. Your own personal umbrella, Detective?”

“Sometimes I call him my partner.”

They basically sprint back to their cars.

* * *

Dan isn’t happy when they try to leave early.

“It’s Saturday,” Chloe says. “We shouldn’t be here anyway. We interviewed the guy, the feather’s in the lab, I’ve typed everything up―”

“Bloody slowly typed everything up,” Lucifer puts in, and she smacks him on the arm with the printout. Dan flinches like she expects Lucifer to punish her for insubordination.

“―So I think we’re good to go. Nothing else is probably gonna get done today anyway.”

“Something’s going to get done,” Lucifer suggests amicably. Chloe hits him again with the printout. Dan flinches again. She has to do something or this is going to happen in a circle all day.

“So here it is, and we’re gonna go see a movie,” Chloe says, slapping the printout down on Dan’s desk. Lucifer grins.

“We most assuredly aren’t.”

“ _Lucifer_.”

Chloe leaves the desk to go get her bag, and Lucifer turns to follow. Dan finds his voice.

“Hey, uh, Lucifer, could I talk to you a sec?”

Chloe and Lucifer both turn back and stare. Dan has a hard look on his face. Lucifer sighs.

“Now there’s a turn-off. Fine, Daniel, what is it?”

Dan’s eyes flick to Chloe. Chloe tries to divine from his expression if Dan’s about to attempt an exorcism, then decides there’s really nothing she can do if he tries it anyway.

“I’ll be at the car,” she says.

Chloe waits a tense five minutes by the Corvette before Lucifer emerges, a thoughtful look on his face.

“Everything alright?”

Lucifer looks quietly up to the sky.

“Never better, Detective,” he says. He sounds distant. He looks back down at her, and seems to come back to himself, taking stock of her and the Corvette. “Am I driving, then?”

“I don’t break the speed limit,” she explains. His grin threatens to eclipse his face.

* * *

He may have hit a hundred at one point. She’s not even sure _how_.

It’s not even evening yet, it’s barely _six_ on a Saturday night, and yet they’re dragging each other through the empty floor of Lux like it’s three in the morning and they’re going to fuck until they drop. He’s on her before the elevator doors even close, a hand wrapping around her head so he can shove her to the wall without hurting her. She arches under him as he captures her mouth, her hands, pins her wrists over her head and presses into her space. The elevator doors slide open and she grins, nudges at his grip until he releases her, takes him by the hand and pulls him into the penthouse. The sun is still high in the sky, it’s not even close to night-time, but fuck it, she’s not waiting until it’s _atmospheric_.

Neither is he. The second they’re out of the elevator, he picks her up like she weighs less than nothing and deposits her on the cool marble bar top, palms her waist, kisses his way down her throat. Something occurs to her as he slowly makes his way down her neck, sliding his hands down to the waistband of her jeans.

“Wait.”

He takes a breath and steps back a little, looks at her curiously. She reaches out a hand, grazes it down the line of his jaw.

“I’m thinking about something.”

Lucifer narrows his eyes suspiciously, turns his head a little to the side. His head nudges a little, almost subconsciously, into the warmth of her palm.

“Detective…?”

Chloe smiles. Okay, yes. She gets her hands underneath her and drops down from the bar top; he reaches a hand out to help but she bats it away. She stands up straight and looks at him.

“Lucifer, I’m thinking about three weeks ago.”

“Yes?”

“When you held me down and told me to _start counting_.”

Lucifer’s grin is downright wolfish. He reaches out but she holds up a hand.

“Not done.”

Now he’s starting to look confused. Of course he does. Mirror of everyone else’s desires. Happy for anything at all in return. He’s got no idea what she’s implying because he doesn’t think of himself as the recipient of anything in turn; in the scant time they’ve been together, she’s only found herself as part of the event, never the one in control.

Let’s test how far this thing of theirs goes.

She steps neatly forward into his space. Puts an open hand on his chest. Feels his rushing heartbeat through the thin warm fabric of his shirt.

“Lucifer… if we swapped that around, and your wings were out. Would you want that?”

Lucifer pauses. He laughs. He laughs again, like he’s not sure how to respond. There’s that uncertainty again. The gaping maw of inexperience when it comes to fulfilling his own desires.

“I… Detective, are you quite serious?”

She can feel her face warming again, but she holds her ground.

“Yes. Would you want that?”

Lucifer’s amused ‘I’m just joking’ laugh catches in his throat. She can feel his heartbeat racing under her hand until it’s as fast as a hummingbird’s, inhuman, too fast to perceive. His pupils have blown wide.

“I…”

Chloe waits for him. It’s a yes or it’s a no, but she’s waiting for him. He’ll need time to get used to this. She’ll have to lead him into the questions for now. It’s going to be a while until he gets selfish with his own desire, but it’ll come, if they start here. If they start tonight.

Lucifer searches her eyes. Seems to come to a conclusion. Closes his open mouth. His answer comes out sharp, tinged with the leading edge of something genuinely emotional.

“Yes. _Yes_ , I’d… I would want that.”

Their kiss is short, hard, and cut off midway by Chloe grabbing a handful of his perfectly coiffed hair and pulling it back gently. He gasps into her mouth as he’s led an inch away from her lips. She breathes her request into him, watches his eyes carefully.

“Lucifer, I want you to take your clothes off. I want you to get your wings out. I want you to _start counting_.”

_There’s_ that shimmer of red. He almost collapses into her when she lets go of his hair, but he sways himself back to a standing position. He nods hastily.

“I think I can manage that,” he says, before almost tripping over himself on the stairs in his haste to get up them. She has enough mercy not to laugh at him.

She joins him in the removal of his clothing; he seems to have spontaneously lost most of his hand-eye co-ordination and is busily cursing every button on his waistcoat and shirt. She helps him, fast and rough, kissing the skin she uncovers as his shirt comes off. The sun isn’t even close to setting yet, the whole night is ahead of them, but she’s curious. Lucifer’s _always_ boasted about his stamina, long before she knew he had any reason to boast. He has a refractory period that comes back like a boomerang. Lucifer’s always kept going until he’s exhausted her, lying next to her smug and proud as she gasps for breath, but she doesn’t know how much it takes to exhaust _him_.

Will it take until the sun sets? Until the sun _rises_?

Lucifer starts unbuckling his belt and then stops still. Straightens up and looks around them. His brain looks like it’s coming back online.

“You alright?” she asks uncertainly. He nods, a line appearing between his eyebrows.

“Yes, I’m just… the wings _out_?”

“If you want.”

“Yes, that… yes, that wasn’t the… Detective, not that I don’t want to get directly to― we may need to think about logistics.”

This might be an interesting one. Sex Logistics 101 with Lucifer Morningstar. Actually, this may be an advanced class.

“Oh, right,” she says, looking around the bedroom. Sheets and pillows on the bed. Rug on the floor. Marble flooring beneath. Nightstands. Lamps. Chair. Curtains. Ancient carved stone walls that probably can’t be replaced. These are all things they will almost certainly permanently destroy with preen oil. _Hmm_.

Lucifer hums under his breath. “I’m not _inexperienced_ with liquidproofing my bedroom, but short of taping plastic sheeting to every available surface… this might not be…”

“The balcony’s already destroyed,” she offers, and he nods.

“The balcony _is_ already destroyed.”

“We should leave our clothes here,” she says, and Lucifer nods again. Wow, guess it’s time for Sex Logistics 201 with Chloe Decker.

“We should,” Lucifer says. “And we should move the outside furniture inside. Perhaps add a few blankets.”

“Blankets you don’t mind getting rid of.”

“Yes.” Lucifer still seems to be lost in thought. “Detective, it is Sunday _tomorrow_ , you know.”

“…And?”

“If this is too much too soon, you can take an evening.”

“Lucifer, do _you_ want to take an evening?”

“Right now I want to shag you _senseless_ , but my question remains.”

Chloe nods. She takes a breath. “To be clear, I’m pretty sure we’ll need Sunday anyway. You know, to fix all the feathers I plan to _put out of place tonight_.”

Lucifer stares down at her like he’s just won the lottery, landed on the moon, and cured cancer simultaneously.

“Lucifer.”

“ _Yes_ , Detective?”

“Clothes off. Wings out. _Balcony_. I’ll get the blankets.”

She finds some blankets from the bottom of a pile in his walk-in closet. When she returns with them in her arms, Lucifer has managed to move every piece of outdoor furniture inside the penthouse, has taken off his clothing and folded it on the bed, and is pouring them both a glass of wine at the bar. No wings. She raises her eyebrows, lifts up the blankets in her arms questioningly. He barely glances at them before nodding enthusiastically.

“Yes, they’re fine.”

She lays them out on the balcony floor. It’s a pretty nice evening, the concrete is warm from the sun, but something soft beneath them couldn’t hurt. At least, it couldn’t hurt _her_. He doesn’t do the whole vulnerability thing anymore.

Lucifer steps out to join her, hands her a glass of wine. She takes it and doesn’t drink. Lucifer’s never been particularly ashamed about being naked, be it in public or in private or in a damn grocery store, but right now he’s glancing around the other buildings thoughtfully, checking their eyeline like he wants to make sure the balcony is above any other eyes. It almost certainly is, but it doesn’t seem to be stopping him from checking.

“Detective, can I ask something?”

He looks uneasy.

“Sure, what’s up?”

“If… my eyes change again, would you be willing to tell me? And to take a pause?”

If this is anything like grooming him, that might be half the time. Is he unaware of how often it’s been happening?

“Of course,” she says again. “I don’t mind, Lucifer, but if that’s what you want.”

“It is,” he says. His voice is firm and certain.

She wants to give him a hug just for expressing his own desires for once. Usually everything she does is just _fine and dandy_ by him, so she’s glad to be able to get something specific.

She prompts him carefully. “Anything else?”

He leans on the railing, and she crosses to join him. He’s looking at her so strangely. It’s that edge of not-human again. He’s been concealed beneath a veneer of false confidence and a cloak of other peoples’ desires for a time that’s longer than she can even perceive. She’s uncloaking him, finding the person beneath it, drawing him into territory he doesn’t understand.

Lucifer fiddles with his similarly undrunk wine glass, holding it in the air over the road. “As I did before with you, I think we should use traffic lights and a safeword.”

“What’s your safeword?”

Lucifer blinks over at her uncertainly. “I’ve never needed one before.”

Oh, right. Because people don’t do things for him. Uh-huh. She steels herself from the crying jag that this could easily lead her into and nudges her shoulder against his.

“Anything coming to mind?”

She expects him to say something like ‘big bird’, in all honesty, but instead he frowns into the middle distance.

“…Samael.”

“What’s that?”

“Something I won’t forget and very certainly won’t say by accident, Detective. I believe that’s the point.”

“Okay.” She hopes he’s not bringing anything weird into the whole safewording thing, but she won’t pry if it’s not her place. “You ready?”

He looks her up and down pointedly. “You’re still dressed.”

“Yeah, wanted to check in with you first.”

The small lopsided smile on his face feels more powerful and breathtaking than his wings have ever been. “You’re one of a kind, but I believe I am _very_ ready.”

Well, okay then. Here goes something.

The wine glasses make their way back into the penthouse, undrunk, along with her clothes, which she just throws on the couch instead of folding them up neatly because Lucifer’s a crazy man for _folding his clothes before sex_ and she just wants her clothes _off_. Lucifer still doesn’t have his wings out when she comes back out to the balcony, sliding the door shut; he’s standing above the blankets, smiling at her beatifically.

“Incredible,” he says, like he hasn’t seen her naked at least four times a week since they got together, and draws her in for a kiss. It should feel weird doing this, standing on a blanket on their balcony at six in the evening, naked, but when Lucifer’s around her capacity to engage with weird increases tenfold. Nothing feels strange about this. He runs a hand down her chest, cups a breast, rolls her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. She gasps into his mouth; they’ve only just started, but she’s already pretty turned on by the whole deal. He’s _visibly_ already turned on by the whole deal. His hand trails lower, sliding down her stomach, fingers― wait.

She closes her hand around his wrist, stepping back. He frowns.

“I don’t come first tonight,” she says. He blinks.

“If this whole event has to revolve around me, I can at least―”

“You could, and obviously I’d enjoy it, and maybe later, but not now.”

Lucifer’s got that blue-screen-of-death thing happening again on his face, but now she understands it perfectly. She closes in and kisses him again. This time she runs her hands deliberately and firmly down him. She trails her fingers down her back. Between his shoulderblades. He makes a tiny whining noise into her mouth. She pulls him down to the blankets. His frozen expression is different, now; it’s dazed, open, a little twitterpated. She puts her hand around him, ghosting her thumb over the head. He gasps like she just did something he’s never experienced before. Wow, _really_? Tonight’s count may be a high one.

“Wings out,” she whispers, drawing her hand slowly up and down. He finally does as requested.

In the evening sun, his wings are warm and burnished, filling the balcony with golden flowing patterns of sunlight. His eyes are already wide, pupils almost turning his eyes black, but there’s no sign of red. She sits back on her heels, takes him in.

His face is flushed, his eyes are wide, his wings are splayed _low_. There’s the ghost of a smile on his open mouth.

“Planning your wicked way with me?” Lucifer asks.

“Something like that.” She lifts up her hand towards a wing. She looks him in the eye.

“Color?”

He almost doesn’t seem to understand the question for a moment. Like he’s not sure _how_ to answer on his emotional state. Then he nods faintly.

“Green.”

She goes slow. He doesn’t seem to have expected that; his wing braces and flutters like he was expecting her to start rough. She does it exactly as she did it twice before; she trails one hand up the bone of his wing, slows at the arch. Pauses before she reaches the preen gland.

She presses her open hand into the arch of his wing. Not much, just a little pressure. His breath hitches. She checks on his eyes. Still brown. He’s staring at her openly, his lips parted. He’s already completely hard.

She slides across his wing and presses down, that same tiny amount, as she glides it across the feathers concealing his preen gland.

Lucifer has to brace both hands on the ground, his head tipping back, as his wing spasms beneath her. He exhales breathily.

“Feel good?”

“Feels bloody amazing,” he says. She does it again and he groans, hips arching off the ground. She leaves the arch of his wing and drops back down to his lap, kisses him. He usually kisses like… well, like he’s been an expert in doing so for generations. Right now, he misses her lips the first time he tries. She puts an oily hand between them and closes it around him again.

“ _Ah_ ,” he gasps. She hovers her thumb over the head, not quite touching. She angles her thumb to let the oil run and collect: lets a drop of preen oil fall onto the slit. Lucifer _yelps_ , eyes wide, bucking into her hand, and, well…

“That’s one,” she says in surprise, wiping her hand on the blankets. His chest heaves as he comes down from it, head tilting, staring down at her hand like he’s expecting to see something he isn’t.

“Unbelievable,” he breathes. “We’ve barely been out here two minutes.”

Chloe’s not sure if he’s impressed with her or frustrated with himself. She leans into him, forehead to forehead, smiles.

“Yeah, well, that’s why I said _start counting_.”

“Yes, _one_ , Detective, I’m so far keeping up,” he says, and _there’s_ that edge of cocky Lucifer-in-the-bedroom amusement she was waiting for. She kisses the corner of his mouth, draws back. The first time seems to have assuaged some nerves: he looks more confident now. His wings are drawing up a little higher, his eyes more firmly fixed on her.

“And do you have a number you’re counting _up_ to? A timeframe you want to work with?”

“I was thinking the sun,” she answers. He smirks.

“It’s a _long_ time to sunset,” he says.

“It’s a _longer_ time to sunrise.”

If he wasn’t sitting, she’s pretty sure he would have fallen over.

“So your plan is to murder me,” he says breathlessly. Chloe grins, shakes her head.

“Nope. Gotta keep you alive ‘til Sunday morning.”

He tips his head back and laughs. “The _sacrilege_ , Detective. Sunday morning. What _will_ you tell the church?”

“Sorry, too busy playing the Devil’s tritone.”

His Satanic refractory period is so far doing its job, because when she reaches behind him to demonstrate what the ‘tritone’ in this context is, it gets him back to being fully hard again. He shudders, a strained noise passing his lips as she slides a hand slowly down three of the long trailing feathers on his back.

“I’ve been wondering,” Chloe says into his shoulder, her other hand making its way to his lap. He groans as she takes him in hand again.

“Oh?” he manages.

“What are these feathers for?” In case he’s not sure which feathers she means, she pulls on them a little as she works him. The moan he makes into her is so far-gone already that she feels halfway there herself just hearing him.

“I-If you want the answer in a full se- _ntence_! You may want to sl… _slow do-ah_ ―”

She slows but doesn’t stop. “Color?”

“Green, you… _rrrgh_ ,” Lucifer manages, forehead dropping to her shoulder just for a place to land, and she laughs. He must have been close. “They’re for _flight stability_.”

“Thanks,” Chloe says. She grips the feathers hard and tugs.

“ _Oh_ ―”

He arches and spills onto her hand again, gasping. She lets him go and sits back. He shakes his head like he’s trying to turn the power back on in his brain.

“ _Two_ , you _minx_ , but you’re going to need to keep count yourself because I’m going to forget numbers at some point.”

“What was my record again? Nine?”

“Yes, Detective, somehow I have a sneaking suspicion that between now and _sunrise_ I might beat that tally,” Lucifer sighs. He blinks open glowing red eyes at her. She sits back.

“Eyes. We’ll take a break.”

He makes a noise at the back of his throat. “Right. Yes. Thank you.” He looks away from her, drawing into himself a little and scrubbing a hand over his face. The red recedes pretty quickly, but she gets the feeling it’s because he’s consciously forcing it and not because anything’s changed between then and now.

“Good to go?” Chloe tries. He nods.

“Thank you,” he says. She shrugs.

“It’s what you wanted,” she says, and she doesn’t mistake his return to that strange inhuman expression just before he cups his hand around her head to kiss her. He’s tilting into her, pushing her back, and this time she lets him. He lays her down on the blankets, hands trailing down her. She spreads her legs a little and he smiles, wings rustling over them, blocking out most of the sunlight, leaving them in a cave of shimmering white feathers.

“I think I’ve come first _and_ second now, Detective,” he says. “One more than we initially agreed.”

“Oh,” Chloe says, raising her eyebrows playfully. “Have I broken a deal?”

“Not yet,” he chuckles, mouth dipping to her collarbone, her navel, her hip. “But I do believe a debt must be paid.”

“Well, if it _must_ be, it _must_ be…”

“My thoughts exactly,” he agrees, before his tongue slides directly onto her clit. Chloe yelps and jolts back― he never just starts _on_ it, he works up to that― but he’s using his strength to keep her hips so firmly to the ground that she can’t even _start_ to move away from him. She gasps; he swirls around it in circles, licks the flat of his tongue against it _hard_. She’s been wet since they started and this is _so much_ after all of that, verging on the edge of too much. She gets a hand down to his hair and grabs him tight, pulls. It does nothing to slow him. It’s like holding onto a Grecian statue, he’s immovable. She pants, tries uselessly to cant her hips up, tries again, and then Lucifer closes his mouth over her clit and she tips over the edge before he’s even started.

“ _Lucifer_!”

He chuckles into her, the vibrations juddering her. She drops her head back to the blankets, grimaces as she’s reminded it’s only a thin layer to the concrete beneath. She grips into his hair again.

“Up here _now_ ,” she says, not bothering to ask nicely, and Lucifer obliges. She grabs up a corner of a blanket and wipes his mouth before she kisses him, not that it does much at all to get the taste of her out of his mouth. She winds her legs around his hips, arching her back expectantly. He backs up a little, wings rustling around them― she realises she’d forgotten all about them, how did that even happen? ― and she raises herself up to a kneel to follow him, climbing into his lap. He looks self-satisfied. She wants to wipe that right off his face. Only _she_ gets to be smug tonight.

She raises herself up over him and Lucifer guides himself into her. She doesn’t take much time to adjust and lower down: she’s been ready for this for half an hour. He smiles and slowly starts to push his hips up, a confident well-practised roll. She leans into him and enjoys the sensation, waits until he seems like he’s forgotten why she could possibly be getting her hands behind him.

Chloe reaches up to his back and grabs the base of both wings, pulling the short feathers under her palms backwards as she thrusts her hips down. His apparent plan of setting a leisurely confident pace abruptly becomes a new plan called ‘yell, flap wings, topple backwards and come simultaneously’. He blinks up at her in shock as she lands on top of him, still pulsing inside her.

“Three,” she informs him smugly. He seems to have forgotten where his mouth is and how it works, so she takes mercy and removes her hands from the base of his wings. They flutter nervously beneath him.

“Three,” he agrees softly. He puts a hand between them, brushes a strand of hair behind her ear. “Just to check, Detective, your plan _isn’t_ to murder me.”

“No, Lucifer.”

“Your plan might not be a very successful one.”

“Are you telling me you’d still be talking the whole time?”

He laughs; she rolls her hips experimentally and it shudders into a gasp. She can feel him getting hard again inside her. Satanic refractory period still going strong. Or angelic refractory period? Probably not worth asking what quirk of biology it is exactly.

She rides him through four, five and six in quick succession, pulling at the trailing feathers down his back just because they’re the only ones she can currently reach. He manages to get himself together enough to get her to two, his hand wet and sliding where they’re joined, and she pulls off him, gasping for air. His eyes are blown wide and… oh, red again. She’d not noticed when that had happened.

“Eyes. Taking a break,” she murmurs. Not that she didn’t need to take a break before, _holy shit_. He closes his eyes and pants, his wings writhing on the ground, as she sits cross-legged and sticky in the setting sun. She really _will_ need to groom him tomorrow. Her hands are sticky with oil and she can see she’s ruffled up half of the feathers she’d put neatly into place.

He props himself onto an elbow and blinks his eyes open. He clears his throat.

“Detective? Are they…?”

She shuffles over to him. Kisses him gently on the cheek. Looks him in his Devil-red eyes.

“Perfect,” she says, “But no, not yet.”

A confused whine leaves Lucifer’s mouth before he seems to be able to stop himself. He snaps his jaw shut, half-smiles like he thinks she won’t have noticed.

Oh, _interesting_. Chloe replays the moment, tries to put it in context. Well, _yeah_ , makes sense. Desire mirror. People compliment him on what he did _for_ them, what they like _about_ him, not what he _is_. She sits there patiently until he’s blinked his eyes back to brown. She nods and he slides forward, kisses her with intent, one hand shifting to her nipple. She’s starting to notice a pattern there. Like he’s apologising for the eyes by shifting attention onto her instead of him. She’s not letting that become a thing. She nudges her hand into his chest, pushes him off.

“Just wanna check something,” she says. “Stay right there.”

He stays. Chloe gets up and walks around him, stepping over his low-splayed wing to get to his back. He raises his wings expectantly but she nudges them back down, stepping over the other to complete her circuit. She makes a show of inspecting him, looking him up and down, kneeling down again and rubbing a hand backwards through his mussed-up hair.

“Yup,” she says, kissing him briefly on the lips. “ _Perfect_.”

This time the look on Lucifer’s face is somewhere between poleaxed and horrified. He laughs uncomfortably. “Appealing to my narcissistic side, Detective?”

Anyone else probably would have believed him.

“Appealing to something,” Chloe says, sliding a hand around the back of his neck before fixing her lips at his collarbone. He hums at the suction. She knows she can’t make a mark on him anymore, but she wants to at least play pretend. She scratches her nails at his scalp. He sighs softly, one of his hands running up and down her arm.

“This is nice,” he says. Words can’t describe how happy she is to hear him saying anything like that out loud. She winds her fingers slowly through his hair and pulls―

“ _Ah_.” Lucifer makes a confused noise. “…Detective?”

She backs off from his chest and… um. Well. That’s a hickey.

She blinks down at it.

But less than half an hour ago she’d pulled at his hair and scratched down his shoulders and he hadn’t―

_What?_

Lucifer probes at the mark she’s left on him; he can’t quite see it from his angle, but he pushes down on it and he can clearly feel _something_ because he’s blinking in abject shock.

“What?” he says. Chloe still has her hand in his hair. She slides it up to the crown of his head, gathers a handful, and pulls hard. He gasps, head swaying back with the sensation.

“Are you vulnerable again?” Chloe murmurs.

Lucifer sways a little in place, dazed. His wings flutter in the breeze. The sun’s starting to sink toward the horizon: his wings are taking on a duskier cast, less gold and more white, patterns spiralling in the heathery purple sunset. His face is a little harder to see in the light. “It would appear so.”

What changed? In the last few minutes, _what changed_? It wasn’t the sex, it wasn’t the―

_Oh_.

She called him perfect.

Oh, that didn’t just _do it for him_ , did it.

Because if the wings have been about testing if she’d run, then what she just did: circling him, inspecting him, treating his inhuman qualities as the normality she’s come to expect, coming back to him and declaring him _perfect_ … If the newfound invulnerability had been him putting up a wall, if the wings had been about pushing her away, she’s pretty sure she just finished battering down his defences and erecting a new statue to Chloe Decker in the main square.

She may have erected something very literal, too.

Lucifer seems to be thinking along the same lines, except she doesn’t let him get to whatever he’s about to say. She redoubles her grip on his hair, her lips to his neck, presses into him, puts her other hand out as far as she can reach it and grabs a particularly large feather on his left wing and promptly tugs both hands at the same time.

“Perfect,” she says.

“Dete―a-aa- _mmhh_ ―”

His wings flap and dislodge a blanket or two behind them. She feels him jerk against her thigh. It only makes her marginally stickier than she already was. The blanket beneath them is a lost cause. Lucifer’s absolutely _sodden_ with sweat.

“Seven?” she asks, letting go of the feather but not his hair.

“Seven,” he strangles out in agreement. He sounds kind of… odd.

“Color?”

A pause.

“Yellow?”

She lets him go, pulls back. Sits in front of him, doesn’t touch. Not _strictly_ their rules for yellow, but his uncertainty is making her nervous. He’s swallowing, one hand opening and closing on his thigh.

“Lucifer, are you okay?”

A shallow nod. His throat jumps. She checks his eyes. Nope, the glittering she saw wasn’t red. He lifts a hand exhaustedly, rubs it over his face, pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs his fingers frustratedly against the tears collecting in his eyes. He takes a deep steadying breath.

“Can we stop with… with the ‘perfect’ talk? It’s _flattering_ , Detective, but I’m not…” He trails off. Rubs at his eyes some more. Under the stubble, she can see a muscle jumping in his jaw.

Chloe chews her lip.

“If you want it to stop, I’ll stop, but I’m not saying it to be flattering.”

“Right, yes. Narcissistic Devil.” He chuckles, but the sound is thready and damp. “Much as I always love a good ego boost in the bedroom, I already have a convincing enough packa―”

“― _You_ said narcissistic. I didn’t. I said it because it’s true.”

Lucifer’s watching her suspiciously, like he expects her to attack him. Does he think this is some kind of setup? After all of this evening, he’s still this wary of the realities of her affection?

_Well,_ that traitorous voice says, returning when she wants it last, _this whole thing came about because he accurately called out your wing fetish_. What’re the odds he thinks this is just… her getting something out of it, still, and that that’s it? That his desire here isn’t the focus? After every single time she’s told him she loves him, he’s still scared to make that final leap?

He wants it to be real, because he’s vulnerable in her hands again. He just doesn’t believe it could be. Everything kind he’s ever had has been stripped from him. He doesn’t know how to trust.

She folds her legs up and plants herself where she sits. Nothing sexual right now. She’s getting this in his head, the bare minimum of it, before she does a single thing more.

“The wings were to test if I’d run. I’m not running. I _like_ them, which is neither here nor there, and is a _nightmare_ for the case, and if I ever have to step in an aviary again I’m going to _scream_ , but that’s irrelevant. I’m not rescheduling my week around Sunday mornings because I’m _horny_. I love you and I want you to feel loved. I’m not out here with you right now because it’s what _I_ truly desire or whatever, I’m doing it because I think we’d _both_ enjoy it and I think you don’t _get what you enjoy enough_. I _love you_ and I want you to _feel loved_. I’m not calling you perfect because I think it’ll be a fun thing to say during sex, I _believe it_. You’re a good man. You’re _kind_. You do s… _so_ much for me.”

Oh _great_ , now the waterworks are coming. Chloe swipes a hand fiercely against her eyes. _Good job, Decker_ , you make _him_ cry during grooming and you make _you_ cry during sex. Lucifer’s just staring again like he’s gotten stuck that way. His mouth is trembling. Chloe opens her mouth to put some sort of button on it, but she just feels stuck on now, like she can’t stop talking. She stares resolutely at the matted blanket between them.

“You just… _don’t notice_ , all the time, how much you do for me, for _everyone_ , and then you just act like it isn’t _anything_ , and I do _anything_ no matter how bad _I fuck it up_ and you don’t seem to know what to do and I just want… I just _want_ that for you, you know? I want you to get things you want. I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to feel alone. _Fuck_.”

Chloe needs to keep talking, she’s not gotten anywhere in that rambling teary mess, but she can feel the build-up of the last few weeks of worrying that she’s been doing everything wrong, in the face of the fact that she’s once more made this somehow about what she wants and what she gets, and her voice tips up in pitch and peters off into nothing. She swallows and takes a deep breath, tries to keep herself from crying too hard. Her face is just a wet mess now.

Chloe risks looking up from the ground at Lucifer.

The sun dips below the horizon.

The sky is a red-purple stretch above them, the lights of Los Angeles starting to glitter, the hum of insects starting to crescendo into the sound of honking traffic and thudding engines. The blanket beneath her knees is matted and sticky. She’s naked and sweaty, face damp with tears, the slight cool of the evening starting to leach onto the surface of her skin. She can feel her heart thudding beneath her chest, her lungs fighting to let her sob.

Lucifer has never looked so human, never so angelic. He’s naked and sweaty, his hair flopping onto his forehead, his chest flushed, a hickey just below his neck. His wings, in the evening light, are swimming in unrepeatable infinite patterns of gold and white, long flowing feathers held low and close to the ground. A single tear track has made its way down his face, his brown eyes glistening. He has that smile on his face, the same one he’d had before he left for Hell, the face he’d had when she told him she loved him.

Which ought to have been a hint, really.

“I love you, Chloe.”

He says it like it’s the foregone conclusion to his entire life, solemn and smiling and shaking.

Chloe’s heart sticks into her mouth.

Lucifer goes to say something else. The noise twists in his throat. Lucifer claps a hand over his mouth in shock as the most anguished noise she’s ever heard punches from him like it’s been trapped for hundreds of millions of years.

As Lucifer pulls air back into his lungs, it kicks out of him again as a second wet and miserable sound. He pitches forward a little like he can’t sit upright, his eyes swimming. He covers his face entirely with his hands, the heel of his palm pushing against his mouth as if to block out the sound of the whine he makes into it. His fingers press hard into his temples like he can stop himself through sheer will alone. He tries to say something again and it only comes out as inarticulate noise.

Oh.

_Oh, okay_.

Chloe shuffles into him, slides alongside him, the tickle of ruffled feathers at her back. She grabs him around the shoulders and rocks him into her. They’re both gross and sweaty but that’s what happens when you start a competition to see how many times your boyfriend can orgasm from his wings _before_ you have the earth-shattering heart-to-heart and the love confession.

Chloe’s not sure if this is _better_ or _worse_ than if he’d actually finished saying it in the evidence room. She guesses it’s not like she had any better timing when she did it before he went to literal Hell.

“Figured it out, huh?” she murmurs into his ear. “That we’re doing this for you, yeah?”

He nods, sobs brokenly.

“I’ve got you,” she says. “I’ve got you, okay? Cry all you want.”

Lucifer doesn’t answer. He’s just barely hanging onto not crying out loud right now, head shaking in his hands, curling into her grasp like it’s the only thing keeping him alive.

“Lucifer, you can be loud.”

It’s as if she pressed a button. His shoulders hunch in with the force of the wail he makes into his hands. She thinks human vocal cords would have probably snapped on that sound. She kisses him on the temple, hugs him closer. Her tears are making it hard to see, but she doesn’t care.

“Not going anywhere. Not running. You and me. I love you.”

His wings close in around them, pulling her close, blocking out Los Angeles. She can hear the slow massing of crowds, far beneath them in the road, and then she can’t: his feathers are so dense and thick that they block out everything but the sounds of _them_ , dark and private. They take breaths in the small stuffy space, match each other as they calm.

She feels him uncurl, slowly, his hands pulling from his head. In the dark, he reaches for her, hand finding her jaw and leading their lips together. It’s a _terrible_ kiss, they’re both damp and gross and they can’t see each other, but she thinks of the effortless confidence of the man that greeted her with boasts of his sexual prowess and she wants to _cry_ with how gentle and uncertain he is now, the curl of his lips against hers like he can’t stop from smiling. She smiles too, wraps her arms around him and hugs, hot and sticky as it is, and he holds her just as tight. No uncertainty, no hesitation.

Cool air and light rushes in as he lowers his wings, lets them rest against the ground, half-folded. He pulls back from their embrace. He’s an absolute mess, but his eyes are warm and steady. Settled. _Peaceful_.

“Well,” he says, “That wasn’t exactly how I planned on doing it.”

She smiles, wipes her face as best she can. This sounds familiar.

“No? After number nine or number ten?”

He laughs.

“I had planned on breaking your record first.”

Chloe laughs wetly. “You were one away.”

“ _Two_ away. Now who’s losing count?”

“Wanna fix that?”

“Has the sun come up, Detective?”

There’s no tension anymore, no uncertainty as she winds her way around his back. He laughs and holds her close, hums happily as she runs her hands up his wings, breath catching pleasantly as she stands up from his hold and crosses to the arch of his left wing, petting into the ruffled-up down. It’s getting fluffy again from how much she’s messed with the oil and preening. She looks him right in the eye, back at the arch of his wing, considers how badly he might be able to whack her in the head if he flaps it, then throws caution to the wind.

She grabs the arch of his wing, pulls back the feathers covering the preen gland, and closes her mouth over it. He doesn’t move his wings because he seems a little busy screaming her name, collapsing back. She moves to pull away and realises her hand at the arch of his wing is the only thing keeping it upright. He groans weakly from the ground.

“Stop, _stop_ , you _maniac_.”

“Sorry,” she says, letting his wing go. It drops heavily to the floor. “Sorry!”

Lucifer covers his eyes with the crook of his elbow, laughing breathlessly like she just told the best joke of her life. He lowers his arm, regards her out of the corner of his eye.

Her mouth tastes of oil. It’s not angelic or divine or particularly dramatic. It’s just sticky, thin, barely tastes of anything. Lucifer giggles on the ground, panting.

“You alright?”

“Oh… yes. Just thinking about how gloriously sacrilegious my life has become.” He snorts.

She blinks slowly. “Lucifer, you’re the _Devil_.”

“You’re taking me to new heights. Tempting me to sin. My my, Detective, on the preen gland? Oh, I simply _couldn’t_ …” He chuckles, propping himself up slowly. “What next? Bird epithets in the bedroom?”

He meant it as a joke. He means it as a joke. Unfortunately for Lucifer, she’s also good at noticing when he’s _evading_ something. He blinks.

“…Detective?”

She kneels down. Straddles him. Kisses him deep and long. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy from crying but they’re brown and steady when she pulls back. His wings are splayed and relaxed. His feathers are glassy white, patches of fleeting gold.

She enters him slowly. No hurry. He’s come eight times already tonight and she doesn’t plan on a tenth, so this is the one she wants to stretch out. He hums and reaches out a hand to her clit, circles it slowly. She smiles. She whispers it between them as he fills her up.

“That a challenge, Big Bird?”

Lucifer stills his motion on her clit. He blinks at her. She knows that he knows that he was about to pass that off as something he didn’t in any way find a turn-on, but she knows that he knows that she _felt_ him twitch inside of her when she said it.

Lucifer licks his lips. Looks her in the eye.

“Am I ever going to hear the end of this?”

“No.”

“Then we may as well proceed.”

She snorts at the formality. “Aye aye,” she says. He snaps a sarcastic salute.

She doesn’t say anything for a while; just snaps her hips up and down, up and down, in a rhythm that would have taken him over the edge five times over if he hadn’t already done so many times more than that. He groans and sighs and hums appreciatively beneath her, drives her slowly to the edge. Skilled damn pianist fingers. He doesn’t waste time or tease her: he tips her over the edge and she falls willingly, gasping his name, pressing him into her. He smiles. She leans in.

Her lips latch at his neck, her hand clutches at his hair. He gasps. She pulls _hard_ on his hair and he gasps again. She speeds up the rhythm, exhausted as she is: it’s a lot, too much, for her right now, but she’s going to make this happen if it’s the last thing she does. He’s writhing beneath her, his wings splaying and folding on the concrete, feathers flowing like silk around them.

“Come on,” she whispers, lips messily trailing his neck, sucking just below his jaw. She scrapes her teeth against his Adam’s apple, just to taste. “C’mon, pretty bird.”

“Chlo- _e_!”

She cannot believe that works.

He gasps underneath her, his hips straining so hard that he forgets his strength and manages to briefly lift them both off the ground. How does he make an orgasm sound _indignant?_ She pulls off him and he stares like he’s about to stage open rebellion.

“Bird epithets,” she concludes. He gapes at her for a moment.

“Just to recap,” he pants, “ _I’m_ the Devil?”

“No,” she replies patiently, “we’ve made fairly clear that you’re ‘pretty bird’.”

He groans, head sliding back against the concrete. He winces as he makes contact with it. _Good_ , she thinks. _Enjoy the vulnerability_.

“Leave me here to die,” he says.

“Shower first, then death. It’s Sunday morning tomorrow.”

“ _No_ , _Chloe_ ,” he says, smile curving on his face despite himself, “You’re going to _kill_ me here, darling.”

“Up.”

Lucifer pretends to not hear her. Chloe sweeps down and pretends to go both-handed for his preen gland and he flails, arms and legs and wings, curses her from here to next week, reminds her the whole way as she drags him from the balcony to the shower that he’s the literal, no-joke, no-frills Devil. She tells him his name. The water in the drain flows gold with the night, wings fluttering soft and steady as a heartbeat in the rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you: hey startingatmidnight why is the first chapter 900 words and the fifth chapter 16 thousand words
> 
> me: haha yeah


	6. Wherein Lucifer Learns to Stop Worrying and Love the Bird Nicknames

He supposes it’s thematically appropriate for him that everything goes wrong the sixth time.

* * *

He’s been aware, in the days leading up to Sunday, that he’s been playing with a double-edged blade. He hadn’t noticed when he first started to lose control of his eyes, but they were, are, will always be the first symptom of his nature. By a coin flip of intent, they speak to the best and the worst of his abilities. Not that intent has meant much, in recent weeks. Right now, his eyes only act in the interests of subconscious self-sabotage.

She’d not said anything about it. He fears that the most. She’d treated it in the same pragmatic Chloe-Jane-Decker way that she treats everything verging past the edge of her mortal perspective: she threw herself into a practical solution, regardless of what she had to suffer through for it.

In the days since he’d found out, he’d kept a close watch. Sometimes he’d caught a glint of something in his cufflinks, would whip his head to the nearest reflective surface, and he could have _sworn_ that he saw the tail end of a crimson glow. Chloe had occasionally teased his efforts to check his appearance in every mirrored object, had seemed confused by his determination to pause each time they turned red last night, but he had been sure of his reasons. It had only started with his hand, before. The precipice of transformation is a knife-thin edge.

Even so, he’d thought he’d have some time, if his worst fear came to pass. Enough warning to allow her to leave.

And instead, he’s woken up a monster.

He hasn’t dared to open his eyes yet, but he can feel the distortion of his body. His spine feels _too large,_ digging behind where his back should end, vertebrae spiking into the mattress. His silk pillow is shifting against his bare head. His wings feel cold and bare, thin-stretched and angular. He rubs one fingertip against another and pricks himself on the razor point of a thick chitinous claw. He can feel his warped tongue, lying heavy in his mouth. There’s a chunk missing from the side of it, and everything tastes like ash.

This form doesn’t feel as it does when he chooses his face. This is a loss of control. He is trapped within it, bound to new flesh.

Right on time for Sunday morning, now how’s _that_ for self-sabotage? After all of last night, all that she’d done for him… Chloe had held him as he’d come apart and she’d put him back together anew and he’d _told her_ and felt _freed_ of some small modicum of the tension in his chest, his spine, his heart. He’d felt a part of himself uncatch, let go of the strain of fearing that he would become too much for her to bear. And now… well, what is he better at than tainting what he’s been given?

He can feel his heart thudding in his chest: the start of his airways constricting, the feeling that his heart might stop at any moment, that his lungs will collapse. The doctor’s taught him a method for this: he times it out. Inhale four seconds. Hold it for seven. Exhale for eight. It doesn’t curb the edge of his fear, it doesn’t make the wings from his back sprout feathers instead of claws, but he stops feeling like he’s going to die.

This would be easier if he didn’t know exactly why it happened. He ought to have _known better_. If he was manifesting his wings in his sleep to test if she’d run, what did he _think_ would come next? He has never felt himself with his wings, even now that he’s opted to keep them instead of cutting them off, but at least they speak to a side of himself that could not innately appal her. This form is built for cruelty, constructed from his own hatred. It is the worst of himself on show, pushed to the surface of his skin like fat on boiling water.

He needs to take stock of it. He has to prepare himself for what he needs to do. 

He opens his eyes; panic claws back up his throat. Chloe’s still sleeping in his arms peacefully, draped in a worn band shirt. A red membranous wing stretches over her. The pale morning sun, filtered through the thin flesh of his wing, casts her face orange. Pathetic clingy creature such as he is, he’s wrapped himself around Chloe too tightly to leave without disturbing her. One arm under her, one arm over her, a leg between her legs. Worst of all, the claw at the arch of his wing has tangled itself into her hair. He has no chance of removing himself from her without waking her up in the process.

He screws his eyes closed, blood pounding in his head. _Forgive yourself, forgive yourself, forgive yourself_. He opens them. He is still a monster. 

How did Kafka put it? _Als der Teufel eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt._ He feels trapped in his own skin. The reformed flesh is tighter than his own, weighing him down and constricting him, binding him taut with chains of himself into a shape he cannot unravel. At least the unfortunate insectoid of the original parable had not inflicted its waking self on _another._ Even if he took the decision to wake her up, warn her of his egress, he doesn’t know if he could manage to leave without _hurting_ her, now that all of his available limbs are ungainly and sharp at the ends.

He’ll have to let her run, but he knows already that her screams will haunt him. It will serve as his punishment.

He does what he can: he lifts the hand on her waist away from her, pulls his leg from between hers. The claw hooked into her hair is a genuine concern, but unless he leans over her he can’t go to untangle it and the absolute last thing she needs right now is this face hovering directly above hers as she opens her eyes. He’ll have to hope that if he stays still, she can do it herself.

As he pulls, the best he can, away from her, she grumbles, snorts, twists around. Her hair wraps even more around the claw of his wing. _Fuck_. He may have to do something about that after all, or she’s going to try to leave and find herself tied to the Devil by her hair. Then Chloe turns, eyes still closed, and—

 _No,_ _no,_ _please, no._ She murmurs sleepily and nestles herself closer into him. Her face tucks beneath the angular mass of his collarbone. Her arm feels its way to his waist.

“Mornin’,” she mumbles, before making a soft, confused noise. He feels her face drag a little across his ruined chest. A sharp intake of breath.

_And that’s it. See what happens when you play pretend at deserving her? Reap what you’ve sown, Satan._

Her face stays in his chest, nose pressed to the valleys of his flesh. Her arm tightens around him, the lean and corded muscle of her bicep tensing the same way it does when she stands at a range. Just before she fires. 

“You awake?” she whispers. 

Is she going to make him admit to this? Lying here with her in his arms, complicit in this cruelty? He can’t stop the shiver that runs through him and that confirms it for her before he can even force the word out.

“Yes,” he whispers back.

She’s silent against him. He feels her hand curl against his back, sliding, feeling. She reaches his spine, the irregular curves of his vertebrae spearing through the dips and hollows of his flesh, and she removes her hand from his body altogether.

“You okay?” she asks into his skin.

What kind of a question is that? Is she still asleep? He doesn’t know if he can hold himself together to have a conversation if she’s sleep-talking. It’s getting hard to breathe again: it feels like he’s poured cold water in his stomach, like he’s pulled his heart outside of his chest and squeezed it tight.

“No,” he says, louder than he meant to, the word getting caught in his throat and shaken about by his lungs. He’s starting to shiver. His limbs are weights, his wings are trembling. He needs to hold still and let her go but he keeps shaking, all around her, his wing tangling in her hair, his fever-hot arm under her waist. 

Chloe pulls herself from his chest and slides herself up onto his pillow, meeting him face to face. Her eyes widen. Her pupils contract, pinpoint-small. He tries to pull away from her, give her space, but she matches the movement and pushes close. Her eyes are meeting his, wide and fearful.

“Don’t run,” she says.

Chloe closes the gap between their faces.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t know what’s happening here but it’s nothing she desires. The last time this had happened, she could barely even look at him. She looks _scared_. Whatever this is _cannot be real_. His best and only option is to stay still. 

She kisses him gently on the cheek.

She pulls back and grimaces. 

_Did she think that would cure him? She’s watched one too many of her child’s films._

“Ow,” she says, and he blinks. “Wh—”

She tilts her head forward a little, and he can see that her hair is pulling taut against his raptor claw of a wing, tangled in a nest. This propels him into movement— he can fix this, if nothing else.

“I’m sorry, Detective,” he says, getting his voice under control, “It’s— you’re caught in the wing, I am so incredibly sorry, please hold still—”

“’Kay,” she answers, blue eyes blinking slowly in the morning sun. She lies there and doesn’t flinch as he props himself up, leans over her, does his best with five claw-tip fingers to unravel his wing from her hair. She’s warm where he’s having to lean on her side; small and solid. Her hair is like spun gold in his fumbling distorted hand. She’s not trying to move, why isn’t she _moving_? His arm is still tucked beneath her body, his wing is tied to her hair, his face looms above hers, the way he’s positioned right now practically _cages her in_ , and yet all she does is stifle a yawn and watch him. Eyes wide, silent. He raises her mostly detangled hair and slides his wing out from beneath.. He leans as far away from her as he can. He _already_ misses the pressure of her body against his, because he can never do anything without making it about what _he_ wants, can he now?

“Done,” he says, voice fading a little in his mouth as he stares at her. She’s taking it all in properly now: her eyes skate across the veiny wing he’s tucking behind himself, the ravaged skin of his chest, the yellowed claws of his hands. She looks in his eyes, holds his gaze. She still looks terrified. She’s biting the corner of her lip. He wants to drag himself under the sheets and stay there, but what good would that do? She’d know what monster was under them.

“I guess this is the advanced test now, huh,” she says. He swallows.

“I’m sorry. If I could do anything to fix this right now, I’d—”

“—No, it… it makes sense, Lucifer. It’s okay. If you were worried about your _wings_ , I mean… I get it. This was going to happen.” She nestles herself a little more into the covers, as if his presence is chilling her. He can feel her waist pressing down into his forearm where her shirt’s riding up. It’s the only place keeping them tethered together, but she’s made no effort to remove his arm and he’s too much of a coward to ask. She’s kept her head opposite his on the pillow. She’s looking at him, up and down, taking it all in silently. Her regard feels like a shard of blue light, lancing open his flesh.

It’s barely the morning; the sunlight is pale and cold. Perhaps he should invest in dark curtains if he’s going to continually wake them this early. It would at least save him from this, the seeing and being seen. He wants to close his eyes and look away, but she holds time itself in the pressure of her silence, and he cannot move until she has permitted it.

At length, she finally acknowledges the arm beneath her waist; her piercing eyes flick down to it, back up to him. She holds his gaze.

“…Does it… hurt?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your skin. Does it hurt?”

The question blindsides him. In all honesty, he’d simply never _thought_ about it. He forces himself to consciously consider his body, inhabit the feeling of it. The flesh is tight, unfamiliar, like wearing an untailored suit: he feels sewn into his skin, pushed into new eldritch shapes. There is, however, no pain.

“No,” he says. “It… it’s strange, admittedly. But no. It doesn’t hurt.”

Chloe tentatively raises her hand and rests it on the crook of his elbow. Slides it slowly up to his bicep. Her hand rests there, between their bodies. Her fingers are cool against the unnatural heat of his warped skin.

He can feel that he’d held his breath, and he forces himself to start breathing again. She looks back up to him, fixes her eyes firmly on his. Her pupils have dilated to a normal size. Her face is evaluating, assessing. He’s stared at this expression often enough to know it as well as he knows her name. She’s trying to solve something.

“When you asked me to stop if your eyes turned red, was this what you were worried about?”

“Yes.”

“Because when it happened the first time, you couldn’t feel it until it had already happened? You thought that might happen again?”

He hadn’t even _realised_ that, but she’s _right_. His clever Detective. Now he’s started consciously assessing the new shapes of his body, though, he’s not sure how he’d never noticed when it first happened. The panic, perhaps? It’s like living inside the carcass of another creature, nothing at all like being himself.

“…Yes.”

“Okay.”

Her hand squeezes his arm a little.

“I know I said it a lot yesterday,” Chloe says, “So sorry if I sound kind of a broken record, but I want to be clear. I’m not running. I love you.”

He slumps without meaning to. He hadn’t realised he’d been poising his wings behind him, tensing his shoulders, straining his neck. Readying himself for the hit. He catches his breath; he hadn’t realised he’d been holding it again.

“I love you,” he says before he can think about it. He’d just wanted to say it again. He hopes he hasn’t just undone the power of the words by saying them with burnt skin and red eyes.

She smiles. Her eyes are crinkling at the corners with it.

Chloe squeezes his arm again. Then, blinking down at the gap between them, she shuffles closer. He doesn’t fight her; he doesn’t try to pull back. She loves him. She _loves_ him. He has to trust in her.

Her legs tangle against his, cold toes on his shin. He’s never been more thankful that he put on underwear last night: nakedness, like this, would be too much for even him to bear. Her head tucks under his chin, her arm drapes over his back. She’s pressed close to him, against the abnormal lines of his body, her cheek tucked into the twisted flesh of his collarbone. Her hand rests a hair’s breadth from the horrors of his spine. 

He moves slowly, gives her time to tell him to stop. He drapes an arm carefully across her waist, keeps his claw-tipped fingers held far from her shirt. He nestles his chin a little into the flow of her hair. Chloe lets out a short airy breath; it sounds like relief, but he can’t see his way to how it could be.

He makes the mistake of glancing to the ceiling, and his breath catches at their mirrored reflection. This is _awful_. Before his body decided to ape the worst of its excesses, he had found a certain amusement in the purchase and display of art depicting him as grotesque. What better than fucking some tall beautiful blonde, hitching her legs around his waist, below a well-conserved original of William Blake’s ‘The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun’? Smiling up at it, defying it, proving it wrong as she screams with fulfilled desire beneath him? It’s not that he doesn’t now recognise, after sessions discussing exactly that, the self-destructive qualities of that former pastime, but nothing is worse than re-enacting it in your mirror image. How is Chloe _standing_ this? Even partially concealed beneath the sheets he looks like a Goya or Blake come to life around her, some chiaroscuro nightmare consuming her light.

Chloe sighs. “Can’t see the hickey.”

His thought process comes to a dead halt.

“Beg pardon?”

“Sorry. I’m just curious if it’s still there. Can I check?”

“…Yes?”

“Lemme know if I find it.”

Chloe raises her arm from his back and presses at the angular jut of his collarbone, shifting her hand by increments each time he does not respond. The third time she does so, he feels the dull spread of a bruise. The tiny thrum of pain shouldn’t make his heart race like it does.

“There,” he murmurs.

She presses again, lightly, pulls her hand back, and hums thoughtfully. “Oh yeah, I _can_ see it. It’s still there, just looks different. Thank you.”

She lifts her head, hesitates, and then presses her lips to the spot. Nestles her face back into him, hair rustling against his neck and chin. Her arm drapes back across him, curling her body tighter into his.

His heart _aches_. How had he never known it could be like this? This strange, absurd intimacy, profound and mundane? It’s a bruise she sucked into his skin. He’s done it to countless humans over countless millennia. She bruised him last night and kissed the bruise this morning. If he breaks it down by action, he can’t put it back together into the whole: this spiralling feeling like he’s rising out of his body, floating inside his head. He’s done anything that can be put to name and a fair few things that can’t be, and he’ll trade it all for her hair uncomfortably tickling his neck, her hand on his waist, her lips on the bruise she made.

For her to stay.

And she’s staying. She’s silent against him, her eyelashes closed and fluttering against his chest, her feet warming up on his legs. The cold silver light of the morning, her body against his, the silence as they breathe, is collapsing in on him. Everything feels empty and still, unmoored from time and reality.

The world sputters to a start and turns on its axis when she starts to snore.

It is perhaps the least beautiful sound he knows. He loves her (he _loves_ her), but he doesn’t consider snoring a wonderful thing just because she does it. She also does paperwork. He accepts it as one of her many mortal idiosyncrasies. It’s never made his heart flutter like it does now, like it might just crawl out of his chest and into hers, make its home beneath her worn-thin shirt and the soft pressure of her breasts, beat painfully next to her steady sleeping tempo.

 _She’s sleeping on him_. The dizzying proof of each buzzing snore against his chest is almost too much for him to stay still, he wants to shake her awake and walk laps around the penthouse until he’s worked off the energy of it. His wings are sloping off the bed, a claw scraping into the marble, his arms around her are ruined and sharp, his body against hers is misshapen, his face is barely his, but in sleep her hand has curled itself into the protruding mass of his spine. Her nose is pressed into the bony cut of his collarbone, her head tilted uncomfortably sideways into his neck. Her hair is sprawled across him, tickling his unfamiliar skin, threading it with gold. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is open. She snores again and he resists the urge to leap up and scream with the force of the emotions battering into his chest.

He can’t sleep, and he doesn’t dare to. Chloe’s trusted him, and he has to prove himself worthy of that trust. His hands are wrapped around her and they’re effectively weapons at this point, no safer than sleeping with knives in his hands. Still, he’s not sure he’d _wish_ to sleep right now. Her peace in the face of his danger is a gift he doesn’t wish to squander.

He uses the time to try and change back. He’s never been stuck like this for so long: when he’d been manifesting his wings in his sleep, he didn’t have to worry about not being able to put them back in. The only cure he knows for this form is forgiveness. He still feels fizzy about Chloe falling asleep on him, and if she tolerates this body enough to do _that_ , shouldn’t that be sufficient for his damnable subconscious? If that isn’t a forgiveness of his shortcomings, what _is_? 

He’s briefly faced with the concept that he might be stuck in this form for a week, a month, _indefinitely_ , and he forcibly matches Chloe breath for breath until he stops shivering.

As the sun crests above the horizon, a thin wedge of light spreading westwards across the wall, his arm falls asleep. He indulges in the strangeness of this newfound vulnerability, the tingling of his nerves losing sensation, as he tracks the progress of the day by the stone carvings illuminated by the sun. By his count, she’s asleep for an hour and forty minutes before she rouses again, cutting herself off mid-snore, unsticking her face from his skin.

“Wht’ti—s’it,” Chloe slurs. She props herself up and squints at the sun streaming through the windows. He chuckles, twitches his wings a little where they’ve gone cold against the floor. He hears a claw scrape against stone and he stills.

“Around seven, I believe,” he says. She mumbles something and wriggles away from him to her bedside table, freeing his dead arm. He pulls the arm back towards himself, massages it carefully with his other sharp-tipped hand to spark the nerves back to life. It doesn’t occur to him to fear that she might leave until she’s already back, shoulder bumping against his as she holds her phone above her face. She glares at the brightness of her phone screen, checks the time, taps absently into her emails. He watches her delete newsletters and spam, squint sleepily at an email from a bank. She seems entirely unconcerned by the Devil at her side.

He has to look down and inspect his chest, his hands, twist over his shoulder and look at his wings, just to double-check he’s not gone mental. No— he’s still as he was. Maybe _she’s_ gone mental.

She puts her phone somewhere on her side of the bed and settles down beside him, blinking up at the ceiling. He follows her gaze: meets her eyes in the Blake painting of their mirror image. Tilted sideways towards her, his wings draping and splaying off his side of the bed, he looks mid-flight, carrying her away. When she speaks, her voice is fuzzy with sleep.

“How were things with Dan yesterday?”

“Fine,” he says.

“Lucifer.” Her eyes, painted pale grey by the ceiling, narrow disbelievingly.

He shifts, watches the subtle flash of grey light in his eyes as he tilts his head. “Truly, Detective, it’s fine. Daniel threatened my head if the urchin should ever come to harm, I informed him that I would do everything in my power to keep her safe, and that was that. I wouldn’t expect a Christmas present, but he seems to have gotten over the shooting-me phase.”

He’s left out some details, but she doesn’t need to know that the reason the conversation stretched for five minutes instead of thirty seconds was because neither of them did a particularly good job of explaining that to the other. Dan had, in fact, been threatening his head if _he_ should harm Trixie, and he’d spent several minutes detailing his determination to protect Trixie _from_ harm before he’d understood the argument they were having. He’d known that Dan would assume the worst of him, but even the _idea_ that Dan would think he’d deliberately hurt Trixie had been _appalling_. 

He’d, perhaps, gotten somewhat _heated_ when rebutting that particular accusation, but he’d clearly made his point by the end of it. Dan had stepped back with both hands raised and told him to ‘calm down’ and that he understood. Or as, Dan had so eloquently put it, ‘fuck, okay, I get it, holy _shit’_. It’s not a blessing on his and Chloe’s relationship, but it’s not attempted murder, and that will have to serve as the best he’s ever going to get.

Chloe seems to be taking his line of thought somewhere else.

“Were you… _expecting_ a Christmas present?”

“…Well, I wouldn’t have turned one _down._ ”

“Hm.”

She’s no longer meeting his eyes: she’s sweeping her gaze across his reflection, taking his shape in. Thoughtfully, as if she’s considering some sort of puzzle. He resists the urge to tuck in his wings: she’s _looking_ , not _attacking_. She just used him like an overgrown teddy bear, if she was going to start screaming in terror she would have done it by now.

“My apologies for today,” he says, gesturing loosely at himself. “I know you went to the effort of rescheduling.”

Chloe turns and drops her gaze to him, the real him on the bed, and he tilts his head back to her. There’s a slight upwards turn to her lips; a strange glint in her eyes. He can’t place the emotion. When she speaks, he can smell mint mouthwash on her breath.

"Close your eyes."

A fair request, she’s had to look at them for a long time this morning. He does so, leans his head down onto the pillow. She shuffles closer into him; her finger makes contact with his skin, traces a cool line down his chest.

"I know you'll have made a plan for today, because you do that. Tell me what your exact plan was for this morning."

Calling it a ‘plan’ might have been putting it a bit strong, but he’d had some ideas, admittedly. She’d indulged him to an extent that felt close to _obscene_ last night: yes, she’d made it unbelievably clear that indulging him had been the intent, but something in him rails at the idea of coming first, literally or otherwise.

“Well,” he starts, hoping this won’t sound somewhat horrifying on his current lips, “I’d planned on starting the day by shagging you senseless. It _was_ how I’d planned on starting _last night_ , if you recall, but something seems to keep getting in the way. One day.”

She replies with an impassive tone. “And then?”

“Hm, well… shower, drinks. The previously discussed grooming, if you’d still been willing. Perhaps a restaurant. I have a reservation for lunch.” He sighs. He feels caged within a prison of his own making. “Not that there’s much chance I fix myself before then.”

Her finger never loses contact with his chest as he talks; it swirls in the uneven musculature of his chest, slides over the places on his abdomen that ought not to have plates of bone beneath the skin. It warms to his temperature.

"Lucifer, open your eyes. Look at me."

He does it. She's looking back at him steadily, _lovingly_ , as if he were― he glances down at himself. No. She's an accomplished actress, after all.

"At me."

He snaps his gaze back to hers. He will need to thank her later for the fondness she's somehow managed to muster up for this.

"What's stopping us?"

He starts for a laugh and then realises it'll likely be a petrifying expression on this face. He makes himself still. Tries to work out what she's saying.

"Detective, I'm sorry, I can't―"

"Yeah you can."

Her stubborn wonderful defiance. It may be the death of him. He sighs, closes his eyes, tries it her way. _Forgive yourself._ He opens his eyes to the same monstrosity.

"Did you think I'd not already tried?"

Her veneer of fond regard drops to something sadder, more wistful.

"Lucifer, that’s not what I'm saying."

An incredulous exhalation puffs from the depths of his twisted lungs. "Then what _are_ you saying?"

She leans in. Leans over him. Puts her face above his, her hands on his shoulders, her eyes blue as morning mist. Calm as a still lake.

"I'm saying, what's stopping us _now_?"

And Chloe kisses him again. This time, she is anything but gentle.

Her tongue is in his mouth before he can protest. She's tasting the same ash he tastes and she’s humming softly into him and he _doesn't know what to do_. He can't raise his hands to her because he can't risk catching her skin on his nails. He can't reciprocate the kiss because he can imagine nothing more repulsive to do to her than to push his ruined tongue into her mouth, as if he has any _right_ to lay claim to her beauty right now. Her tongue swipes across his before pulling away, a wet trail drawing taut between their mouths before she takes his bottom lip between her teeth and _scrapes_ ―

The sting of mortal pain stirs him to action. He sits up, tilts himself away from her, catches his breath. He can feel his wings drawing up behind him, pitched at their unnatural angles, cold with the absence of feathers. She sits up, keeps an arm's length distance, looks at him expectantly. Her lips are wet and red, her blue eyes darkened by the widening abyss of her pupils.

"Thoughts?" she says, like she just asked him his opinion on the weather. _Bright and breezy today, love, with a 50% chance of swapping spit with a monster from the pits of Hades. Over to you in the studio._

He tries to come up with a response. What answer does she want? Enthusiastic assent, well-trained denial? Does she want him to be so moved by this show of deliberate indifference to his face that he'll dissolve into unmarred flesh once more? What answer is sufficient for her desire when he can't so much as guess at it?

Chloe frowns.

"Lucifer? You alright?"

"No, I— no," he says. He feels cold. He feels like his bones are made of lead. He can feel the base of his spine where he sits, spiking past the sheet and into the mattress, boring a hole into their bed.

She slides her hand across the mattress, stretches it towards him. He can't deny her the request, but he goes slowly with his claw-tipped fingers, keeps them splayed out with the points tipped into the mattress. She knits their fingers together, her palm pressing into the back of his hand.

"That was a lot," she says. "I'm sorry."

He doesn't answer. He looks in her eyes, tries to puzzle this out via the pupil alone. He's familiar with the movements it makes when he's drawn out a desire, a want, a hidden belief― he just has to map that knowledge onto her.

Chloe looks unblinkingly back. Calm as the sea after a storm. Pupils blown wide, slowly contracting with the brightening morning sun. He's learning nothing. She squeezes his hand.

"We scheduled Sunday for you," Chloe says. She's measuring her words slowly, deliberately, the way she talks down an armed assailant or interrogates a reticent suspect. "It's up to you what you want to do. If you want to do anything. But if you still want to do this morning the way you planned it, I'm here for any and all of it. Feathers or not. I'm not running. You're _not_ pushing me away. I love you."

He's pinned by her, overcome in the wash of her regard. The swirling comforting emptiness of the morning has collapsed into him again. He isn't on the verge of tears, which is a _welcome bloody change._ He isn't unmoored, he doesn't want to make his escape, he's not waiting for her to run.

She loves him. She's not running. He's not pushing her away. She's seared these truths across his heart, sealed their authenticity with last night's certain and unbroken love.

...She may also be a hundred thousand times naughtier than he had previously believed. Is she _entirely_ remembering him correctly?

"Chloe..."

Her eyes always snap to his when he says her name― it's his closest guarded treasure, each rare selected moment not to be wasted, but he needs her honesty for this. He needs to trust her answer.

"Yes, Lucifer?"

"That list started with 'shagging you senseless'."

Her lips slowly curve into a smile. She nods deliberately.

"And then a shower. And then drinks. Though I’ll probably get food instead."

She's mental. She's actually mental. Something's swirling faintly in his head. It must be whatever he's taken to be hallucinating _this_.

"Yes, Detective, I can guarantee you that _breakfast_ isn't the part of the list I'm having trouble with."

"No?"

"It might be the part of the list at the _top_ , where I specified I was going to _shag you senseless_."

"Yeah, I know."

"Right, is there any chance my wings turned you _blind_ yesterday?"

Chloe’s mouth twitches in the way it does when she’s having to work at not laughing.

"I can see fine, Lucifer."

"Just checking," he says. He's vaguely aware that his voice is reaching a higher register than usual. Her hand tightens around his.

"Your fingers aren't going in me."

He splutters. " _Excuse me?_ "

"Just while we're setting ground rules."

"Not to be _painfully_ obvious about the Devil in the room, but _you want to fuck me_ _like this_?"

Her lips press together. There's something there now, he can see it― the beginnings of something withheld. She licks her lips, looks up at his face― somewhere above his eyes, where his hairline would be if he still had one.

"If I tell you something will you promise not to laugh?"

"Right now I'm working on not having a _heart attack_ , darling, so I'm a little too busy for it."

"A long time ago I had a dream where you had horns."

Ah, right on time, the heart attack he ordered. This is almost certainly what one feels like.

"Once again, _painfully obvious,_ please, we're talking about a dream in which―"

"I was dreaming about having sex with you, yes, Lucifer." There's a faint cast of pink to her cheeks. "I'm not― look, Lucifer, this isn't― _this_ ," she says, lifting the hand that's not wrapped in his to gesture vaguely to his body, "wasn't that. And I know I've― reacted _badly_ , in the past, to you, like this. But I’m also not… against it?”

If it’s at all possible, he may actually be more confused than when she started talking. This is clearly registering somewhere on his face, because she keeps going.

“If you’re not. I just… The night when… they took Charlie? When you intimidated the… I may have been… okay, into it a _little_?”

He’s vaguely aware his mouth is hanging open and he frankly couldn’t give a toss if his jaw entirely drops off.

“Is there _anything_ that you _won’t_ try to have sex with?”

Chloe’s eyes widen. He replays what he just said in his own head and—

“—Alright—”

It’s too late, he’s lost her. She’s tilting back, shoulders shaking as she laughs, covering her mouth with her hand. She looks like she’s only keeping from pointing at him wildly with the last vestiges of her ever-decreasing tact.

“—Yes, Dete— Detective, yes, I understand that from me that _might_ sound—”

She sways forward as if she’s on a pendulum, giggling hysterically, grabs his shoulders and drops her head onto the closest and laughs at him so loudly he’s starting to fear for her sanity.

“—Hypocritical, but—”

She tilts back again, smiling at him with irrepressible amusement.

“Hypocrisy, yup,” she agrees, smiling wide. He searches for _anything_ that can drive this home.

“—Forgive me, Detective, it’s just a slight leap for you from _divine wings_ to _the Devil_ , so I’m having trouble putting it all together here.”

“I can put it together for you,” she says, nodding. “Sometimes things you aren’t into _become_ things you’re into if you experience them with people you love. Am I making sense now?”

His head is going to unscrew itself from his neck and fly off. He laughs nervously, talks like a madman.

“Yes, I… yes. Yes, alright, you’re making sense now. You’re _unbelievable_. Okay? Okay, then. Wings and claws and all?”

Chloe looks down thoughtfully at the hand she’s holding, smile fading.

“' _Claws’_ is maybe putting it a little strong.”

“How _exactly_ is that putting it strong?” He could rend flesh from flesh with these if he didn’t keep a constant watch. She’s kind, but this is just lying to herself.

“ _Cats_ have claws. These are just sharp fingernails.”

“If they’re dangerous, what does it matter how they’re attached to me?”

Chloe’s still staring at his hands, worrying at her lip like she does sometimes on a case. He knows this expression too: she has the evidence, but she hasn’t yet connected it into a cohesive whole.

“You’re vulnerable again,” she says slowly, before standing up and walking off. He blinks up as she retreats, drawing his wings to his back.

“Detective? Where are you going?”

“Just a sec.” She walks into the bathroom. He hears a susurrus of unzipping, gentle clicking. She comes back into the bedroom with a crumpled-up plastic bag and a small linen pouch, lightly stained with foundation. She unzips it and dumps the contents on the bed, sifting through the unwashed makeup brushes and sponges until she finds what she’s looking for.

“Oh,” Lucifer says, because frankly, he hadn’t even considered this.

Chloe holds up the nail scissors demonstratively. “Yeah, again, sharp fingernails.”

He looks down at his hands, tilts them. The claws― nails, he supposes, by her definition― are thick and yellow, tapered to a sharp knife edge at the end. He looks uncertainly at the thin scissor blade.

“I’m not sure if it’ll work.”

“Only one way to find out,” she says, standing up and beckoning him to sit on the edge of the bed. He holds out a hand and she takes it in hers, puts the scissors to his index finger.

It takes longer than with an average fingernail, but not by much. Chloe carefully puts the knife-edge clipping into the plastic bag she’d brought with her, moves to the others. She cuts his weaponry from him with Chloe-Jane-Decker pragmatism, deposits the remains of his potential for cruelty in a bag he thinks she may have saved from a trip to the dollar store. Neither of them agreed on silence, but he cannot think of what to say and she does not prompt him to speak. She finishes both hands, takes the bag away to the bathroom and clatters it into the bin, comes back and sifts through the mess of untidy makeup and tools until she locates a glass nail file. He could do this part himself, but he doesn’t ask to: he lets her take his hands of waxen red skin, file the edges of him round and smooth.

She swipes the file clean on her shirt and tucks everything back into her zip pouch, leaving a slight stain of mascara on the sheets from the stained bottle she’d tipped onto it. She leaves him alone as she returns to the bathroom, and he inspects her work. Cups one hand in another. Pushes a declawed nail into the pad of his thumb. His hands still don’t look, feel, like his, but at least he won’t have to worry about damaging anything just by touching it.

Chloe speaks from the doorway of the bathroom. She must have been watching him.

“Okay,” she says, clearly aiming for flirtatious and landing somewhere in the realm of stilted and awkward, “ _Now_ they can go in me.”

It’s the strangest way he’s ever been propositioned, but the problem is, imagining what he’s imagining right now, even her absolute inability to flirt is enough. He can only thank himself last night for opting for boxer-briefs instead of nothing, or he would be too much for even _him_ to look at. Only a matter of time until she notices, but then that seems to be the whole point right now, isn’t it? Inexplicably?

“You’re _sure_?” he asks, because he’s starting to come up with a scenario in which she’s been sleep-walking for the last few minutes. He feels misshapen and overlarge sitting on the edge of the bed, like a gargoyle overlooking his own penthouse. This cannot be happening. “We can skip directly to _anything_ else on that list, or none of it, I’m not forcing you into— _this_ —"

Chloe crosses her arms. “Lucifer, I was embarrassed enough admitting to the dream the first time, _please_ don’t make me repeat it. You’re _not forcing me_.” Her firm tone turns softer, gentler. “The morning was scheduled for you. This is _your_ choice. It’s up to you. What do you want to do?”

His mouth feels dry. Every part of himself his subconscious turns up for her, flips like a stone with insects crawling beneath it, she finds her way to loving it. He couldn’t love himself like this if he had another eternity for it, and she comes along and cuts him free of his sharp edges and asks him to…

The boxer-briefs really aren’t doing _anything_ to hide it now. Some insane spark of hope rattles into his chest and takes hold. If this is about what he _wants…_

He wants her to come apart beneath him. He wants to fuck into her and hear her scream and not fear that she’s afraid. He wants to trust this, this strange and absurd and incredible thing between them, that he loves her and she loves _him_ , not just the man she thought she knew but the one he _is._ He wants to hope. He wants to lose this fear that one morning she’ll wake up and see something she despises. 

He presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth until he is sure he won’t say all of that out loud. He starts with the first of it, the least of his tangled doubts.

“I want to kiss you,” he says. Chloe’s smile is small and genuine, more in her eyes than in her lips, which are promptly busy on their own mission of crashing forward into his. He closes his eyes, deepens the kiss. With his eyes shut it’s like it’s _them_ again, like he’s still truly him. He raises his hands to her, because he _can_ now, smoothing her shirt against her waist.

She rests her forearms on his shoulders, leans into him where he sits, and he shifts himself back so there’s room for her to kneel on the bed between his legs. Her hand stutters over his head, moving automatically to pet into hair that doesn’t exist, before shifting to the back of his neck, curling against the beginning of his mangled spine. He doesn’t notice where her _other_ hand’s going until it palms his clothed erection, and the white-hot spike of sensation makes him jolt, gasping. He feels his wings brushing the silk and realises he’s flared them out to full bat-wing stretch: he folds them up abruptly. He might not be able to change back right now, but he can at least not make this _worse_ for her. Why did he _react_ so much?

“Is this okay?” she asks. He knows what she’s asking, but he still indulges the urge to look down to his lap. She’s grabbing him through the fabric and _oh._

 _Oh no._

He’s more than familiar enough with this particular part of his anatomy to know that it looks _different_ in her hand.

He tries to focus in on the feeling, to take stock of what’s exactly changed, and all he succeeds in doing is focusing so intently on it that it twitches in her grip. Panic is chasing arousal, fear mingling with heat.

He takes a breath. She’s not running. She’s _not_ running. The worst-case scenario is that they stop.

“ _That’s_ fine,” he says, “But I… Detective, the last time this happened, I didn’t exactly _check below the belt_.”

Chloe stills, follows his gaze down. She tightens her hold a little, as if to gauge the difference, and he exhales harshly from the pressure. The girth is _definitely_ wider than usual. He’s not sure if it’s inherently more sensitive or if he’s just so keyed up with stress that _everything_ feels more sensitive. Her eyebrows raise.

“Okay,” she says. “So, uh… how do you want to do this?”

He’s about to tell her to just hang it all and pull them off, but about a hundred different nightmare scenarios about what’s underneath fight for his attention. He extricates himself from her, slides back and off the bed.

“I’m going to… just a moment,” he manages, because ‘ _off to see if I’ve grown anything untoward down there as well, darling_ ’ doesn’t want to cross his lips. She nods, and he strides to the bathroom, almost slamming his damn wings into the doorframe as he does so. He doesn’t often close the door to _anything_ , but panic is starting to slide around his throat again. He needs the veneer of privacy.

He closes his eyes at the sink so he won’t have to look at himself as he runs cold water and splashes it on his face, dragging ruined hands down ruined skin. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. His wings tremble behind him, fleshy and spiked, cold without feathers, and he briefly entertains the image of chopping them off.

He turns away from the mirror and looks down. He knows he’s a little eager at the best of times, but the fact that he’s still half-hard despite the phallic crisis he’s having right now is just _ridiculous_. _Figure out if it’s grown cloven hooves before you start imagining where you could be putting it._ He glances uncomfortably at the closed door before pulling down the boxers.

 _Millennia_ of sexual experiences, and the _first_ time he has a serious relationship, self-actualisation decides to throw him as many absurd curveballs as possible. _Why is it bigger?_ How does that track with _anything at all_? He’s calling Linda first thing tomorrow and scheduling her entire week for him so she can find whatever part of his subconscious is driving his body and cut it out with a rusty spoon. It’s exactly as veined and red and waxen as the rest of him, except it’s _not inconsiderably bigger_. He wasn’t exactly working with something average to begin with. He hadn’t noticed any size difference before Chloe had drawn his attention to it, but perhaps his devilish side is a grower, not a shower. 

He takes himself in hand and hisses with the feeling. It really _is_ more sensitive. Just wonderful. If Chloe isn’t going to run screaming, perhaps he ought to give it a try instead.

Speak of the Detective: there’s a tentative knock on the door.

“Lucifer? You okay in there?”

He looks back at himself in the mirror. Red eyes and misshapen flesh meet his gaze, cloaked by the dark jagged edges of his wings. Just a monster grabbing himself in the bathroom, what isn’t alright right now? He pulls his underwear back on and resists the urge to start breaking things.

“Well,” he says, forcing a bright tone, “If I don’t find a way to turn back sometime soon, I think my only recourse is extreme pornography.”

Silence from behind the door.

“Haven’t you already done that?”

He huffs a reluctant laugh. “Let’s just say I think I’m going to take things to new _heights_.”

She groans. “If you can think up puns, you can open the door.”

He opens it. Chloe’s leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed: she raises her eyebrows expectantly.

“You okay?”

He searches for any phrase that sums up the experience of your own subconscious trying to test the boundaries of your relationship by adding a few inches under the satanic belt while you sleep.

“Detective, when you were cultivating, amongst other things, your wing fetish, did you ever spend any personal time wondering _exactly_ how big a penis can get? Asking for a me.”

By her reaction, he may not have found the ideal phrasing, but he’s sure that _Shakespeare_ couldn’t put together a tactful way to get through this morning.

“Huh,” she says, her face starting to go an unusual shade of pink. “So. It _is_ bigger.”

“Also red, but I suppose that might speak for itself.” He gestures at himself, and her eyes, which have widened considerably, flick downward.

“Uh-huh.”

“Detective, have I broken you?”

“No! No, just. Thinking.” She nods. “Okay, then.”

“Sorry?”

“I mean, I think I broke my metric for weird back when _preen oil_ became a thing,” she says, her face set and determined. “So _okay,_ then.”

He opens his mouth, to ask her if she’s truly alright or if she’s just snapped, and then just… stops. The part of his brain that’s automatically railing at the idea that she could want him like this appears to have gone on holiday. Or maybe it’s just finally folded up and given in. Why _is_ he being so hesitant? He’s finding every reason to back away, to remove himself, and she’s pushing forward every single time. He might not be able to read her desires, but he’s also not _blind and deaf_.

Although he might be starting to lose blood pressure in his head. That’s fine. That’s just fine and dandy.

“Okay, then,” he agrees, a little dazed. Chloe’s been gentle with him all morning, likely because he’s been reacting to her interest like a nervous virgin all morning, so he expects her outstretched hand to be for leading him over to the bed, hand-in-hand.

He’s right and he’s wrong: she _does_ lead him to the bed, but it’s _not_ hand-in-hand.

“― _Oh_ ― Detective!”

She smugly lets go of him at the mattress. He spirals through whatever little is left of his grey matter, tries to find his way to a plan of action. She cited her moment of _kind of being into it_ as the moment he commanded Dromos and the bastard bunch to return to Hell. He can’t conceive of _why_ , nor can he draw it from her, but he can at least start with what he has. Take some initiative on what she wants from him.

He winds his hand to the back of her head and pushes close, dips down to kiss her. She stretches up into his grasp; he can feel the slight curve of her lips against his, the taste of her mouthwash chasing away the ash on his tongue. He palms her waist, slides his hands with purpose to her hips, grips tight and throws her firmly onto the bed. She yelps, drops onto the sheets with wide eyes and an open mouth, props herself up on her elbows. 

He steps close and looms over her, tilting his head. Standing like this, she’s in his shadow. He can’t gauge her expression.

“Colour?” he asks.

Chloe nods. Her wide eyes are sparkling with something. Her open mouth closes, raises to a small and unquestionably _confident_ smile.

“Green.”

His heart leaps. He glances down at himself meaningfully.

“Darling, I hate to tell you this, but you _might_ be colour-blind.”

She laughs and he chases the sound, joins her at speed on the tangled mess of rumpled golden silk. She reaches a hand out for him, draws him in. She doesn’t flinch when he holds himself over her body. He doesn’t see her close her eyes when he starts the kiss, and when he pulls back her eyes are open. He vaguely wonders if she closed her eyes at all. He has a hand halfway up her shirt, and Chloe takes the hint: she wriggles out of it and chucks it somewhere off the bed.

He feels like he _ought_ to telegraph every movement, go slow and gentle so he doesn’t scare her, but all evidence is pointing to the contrary and he’d like to think he was paying attention to these sorts of things for the last few millennia. He drops his mouth to Chloe’s chest, swipes his tongue in a tight forceful circle over one nipple and then the other. He slides a hand to the waist of her sweatpants and smooths his fingers against the warm curve of her hip. Chloe lifts her hips off the bed, her breath shallowing, her smile inviting. He pulls her sweatpants off, resists the urge to tear them from her body. Her feet bump against the low curve of his wings as she kicks them to some corner of the bed. He bites her nipple lightly, licks where he’s bitten, presses the flat of his hand on the jut of her pelvis and curls a finger firmly down. Her response would be considered heresy in more than a few corners of the Earth.

“ _Yes, Lucifer_ ,” Chloe whispers. He closes his eyes and tilts into her, sets his thumb just above her clit, slides two fingers against her folds. Without the extra certainty of drawing out desire, it’s reassuring to feel how wet she is against him, to hear her breaths shudder and lengthen. He presses in with his hand, thumb pushing down, fingers curling up. Chloe rocks into his hand, moaning. He sets a fast pace: he could spend hours winding her up, mapping out every inch of her skin, but she’s not looking for slow and sensual right now. She has the Devil in her bed, and she wants the Devil. He can oblige.

He slides himself down. He adds a third finger, pumps fast and unrelenting into her, drops his mouth to her clit. She wails, head throwing back, arching. He drapes an arm over her waist and holds her hips to the bed. He uses a little more strength than he would ordinarily: just a reminder of what he is, what’s holding her down. He glances up, risks opening his eyes, to see if this is eliciting the expected response.

It isn’t. The response he gets _instead_ is that Chloe gasps, grabs him by the drawn-close raptor-claws of his wings, and tugs him downwards into her like she’s riding a rodeo bull.

 _Her dream about horns_ ― she really does get _exactly_ what she wants from something, doesn’t she? The feeling of her hands on him isn’t unpleasant, it’s like someone’s pulling on his shoulders for attention, but the implications of it are threatening the structural integrity of his boxers. He lets himself be pulled, curls his fingers as he leans his whole body towards her, ruts into the mattress just to relieve some of the building pressure. He decides to end this in ten seconds or her money back.

“Lucifer, Lu― _oh my_ ― _Lucifer_!”

He’s never going to tell her that it took eleven seconds, because then he’d have to admit to the fact that he sets himself time trials. He licks her through the aftershocks until she lets go of his wings and flops back, covering her eyes with her elbow. He uses her moment of sightlessness to put his hand inside his boxers and palm himself roughly, sparks flying behind his eyes even from the meagre sensation. He bites the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t make a sound.

Chloe opens her eyes, panting. He backs away, hands returning to his thighs, giving her space. She sits up, her cheeks flushed. She raises a hand up, hovers it in the air just above his shoulder.

“Can I…?”

He curves his wings down for her to reach.

“You’ve had your hands all over the other ones, may as well see what damage you can do here.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, you really _hated_ it last time.”

He raises a wing thoughtfully, stretches it to watch the skin pull taut and thin. It’s a little disconcerting, how different it is: it’s smaller, more flexible. With the bones stretching down as well as along the wing, opening it out feels like splaying a hand.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

Chloe reaches to his left wing. She hovers her hand hesitantly above the thickest leading bone, just below the claw at the arch. She lays her hand on him. It feels normal: no more sensitive than if she was gently holding his arm. She pets her hand down the dark ridge of the wing, glances between his face and her hand.

“Is that alright?”

“Perfectly,” he says. With the flexibility of this wing, he doesn’t have to just stay still and watch: he curves it a little closer to her hand so he can move in and situate himself at her neck, make his home there. She hums as he sets about making a mark, her hand pressing and massaging into the lean muscles beneath the leathery surface.

“Lower,” she orders. “We have work tomorrow.”

“Boring,” he murmurs, but shifts his attention to just below her collarbone. He feels at his chest, finds the hickey on himself. He brushes her hair from her chest and copies the position as well as he can, just besides the silvery dip of her scar. Chloe stops petting gently down his wing and moves her hand lower, fingers splaying against the fleshy membranes between the bones. It’s strange, but not bad. 

“Not as sensitive, huh,” she says. He’s a little busy with his mouth, so he just hums an affirmative. She hums back at him, her other hand trailing slowly over his head. The fingers tracing his wing run gently back up to the wrist, the claw spiking from it, slow and methodical as if committing his worst attributes to memory. 

He raises his head from her, leaving behind a wet crimson mark. The look of it, the sheen from his mouth, the knowledge that only _he_ gets to mark her in this way, pools low in his gut. Chloe blinks down at it, rubs at the bruising skin.

“Hey, we match,” she says, lightly amused. He sits back again, takes her in.

“Not precisely the same location, but I do my best.”

“Oh,” she says, meeting his gaze, something softening in her eyes. “Oh. Yeah, it does, that too.”

He tilts his head. “Oh? What did _you_ mean?”

She doesn’t answer: she just takes one of his hands by the wrist and lays it flat to her sternum. The love bite isn’t quite the same colour, but it’s close enough for him to take her point. He’s vaguely aware that he may have lost track of his plan to act like the Devil she desires this morning, but it’s somewhat tricky to act up to his former kingship when she keeps derailing him like this. She’s tilting her head back a little, regarding him with an arch of her neck, eyes hooded. If anyone here is truly patrician, it’s her.

“Lucifer?”

“Yes, Detective?”

“You gonna take those off now, or?”

“Mm. Yes.” He refuses to move an inch away from her, in case the spell is broken. He tears the boxer-briefs and throws the shreds forcefully off the mattress. He watches her watch his cock spring free of the fabric.

He’s starting to get the hang of her reactions to him now, so he’s expecting her to move from shock to acceptance, take a pause, and then go into action. As such, her hand immediately wrapping around the base of him is a _little_ unexpected. He bites back the moan building in the back of his throat, forces his hips to stay where they are. He has impressive fortitude, but since Chloe he’s having to amend that statement to _most_ of the time. Right at this moment, he feels as hair-trigger as he had last night.

“I am trying so hard,” Chloe says, “Not to make a muppet joke right now.”

He has been happy, for _centuries,_ with his personal laundry list of kinks. He is not adding a _single_ muppet more.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re _extraordinarily_ bad at dirty talk?”

She releases her grip and slowly runs her fingers up his length, her cool hand coming to a halt at the head. He can’t entirely conceal the shudder that runs through him. He realises he’s staring, and drags his eyes from the sight to her face. She looks unbearably smug.

“So long as we both know what muppet I’m referencing.”

“Yes, quite certain, Detective, thank you.”

“You’re not saying it like you _know_ ―”

“― _Alright_ ,” he interrupts, leaning in and kissing her before she can keep talking. 

The problem isn’t the muppet talk, and she knows it as well as he does. The problem is the fact that his body keeps building these scenarios specifically to test the limits of her willingness to tolerate him, and she’s so… so _her_ that she finds some absurd mundane in-joke for each one in turn. It would be infuriating if it wasn’t becoming a worrying Pavlovian response. Seemingly unbothered by the Devil on her lips, Chloe huffs a laugh into the kiss, licking into his mouth. His tongue is still warped, but he knows how to move it, at least. He runs his hands down her arms, to her waist. She breaks away for air.

“You’re hot when you’re annoyed,” she murmurs against his lips.

“A _little_ better. Practising, are we?”

Chloe reaches over his shoulder and pokes a wing.

“You get all puffed-up and flappy.”

Oh, unbelievable. He _needs_ to keep an eye on that. He tucks the batlike appendages close behind him, ignoring the urge to shake them out and flutter them. Her nose brushes his, and he locks eyes with her. Even this close to his skin, her eyes are sparkling with mirth. He risks glaring.

“ _Flappy_?”

She smiles toothily. “Yeah, like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like this,” she says, and she swipes her thumb over his head, dragging at his foreskin. He gasps: the sound of leathery skin and rushing air alerts him to _exactly_ what she means. He tucks his wings behind him again, thankful that at least this face will hide the worst of his embarrassment. He’s become profoundly unused to having conversations with wings on show, let alone anything else besides. ‘Flappy’. This is becoming absurd. Perhaps now, then, would be the time to throw a little more insanity onto the pile.

“I ought to mention,” he says weakly.

“It’s bigger?”

He huffs a laugh. “Ah, you noticed.”

“That’s the kind of work they pay me for.”

“Estimating penis leng― you know what, I’m getting off track here. My subconscious, for some unearthly reason, decided that more sensitivity is exactly what the Devil ordered. Which it wasn’t.”

Chloe lets go of him and turns away, leaning over to his bedside table. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t disappointed, but if she’s gotten to this point before quailing, perhaps he can negotiate his way back to wherever her acceptable limit is on ‘sex with the actualised Devil’. She makes a vague noise as she lies sideways on the bed and shuffles about in one of the drawers on his table.

“Mm-hm?”

“…Which, ah. You don’t have to take that as an invitation to do anything with it― me. Truly. I’m extremely grateful that you’ve tolerated my more monstrous si― Detec _ti―mhhm_ ―”

He’s not sure if it’s because his body temperature seems to run outstandingly hot like this, or because he wasn’t expecting it, but when she turns around and immediately wraps a cool lubed hand around him, he almost jumps out of his skin, words strangling to a halt. 

“For the record,” Chloe says, solemn in spite of the firm grip she has on the Devil’s cock, “’Tolerated’ is the wrong word for what I’m doing, which is spending the morning with you. I also wasn’t ‘tolerating’ your angel wings. They’re a part of you. You look different right now, but you’ve not _stopped_ being you.”

He opens his mouth to protest. She slides her hand up and down, once, slick and cold, an ice cube on his feverish skin, and the words in his mouth twist themselves into the beginnings of some lost sound. He snaps his mouth shut, halts his hips from chasing the feeling. Chloe smiles, something strange dancing in her eyes. She leans into him, the curtains of her hair tickling his chest, one hand curling to the back of his head as she starts a slow rhythm. He exhales shortly and focuses on not bucking into her hand, or this could be over a little sooner than he’d like. The calluses of her trigger finger drag against the dips and furrows of his scarred skin, press on a vein. She raises her head to look at his face, hair falling in strands across her eyes. He brushes them back over her ear with a scarred hand, and she smiles.

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” she says. He shakes his head.

“Would be bloody mad to tell you to stop,” he says, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out as she turns her hand and cups his balls. She shakes her head in turn.

“Not what I’m talking about,” she says. She rises up on her knees, puts her mouth by his ear. Her tongue is hot against his earlobe, and it’s distracting enough that he’s almost forgotten she’d said anything at all by the time she starts talking again. Her voice is so low that it’s almost inaudible, a whisper of air against him.

“So perfect like this.”

His hips stutter forward in her hold. He frowns, but he can’t see her face like this. He’s not sure that’s what she said. It couldn’t have been, that’s absurd. He focuses again on the sensation, on the rise and fall and twist of her hand, biting a groan back as she runs the thumb of her other hand up a vein on the base. He puts his hands back to her, unable to resist any longer: he circles her clit with a thumb, feels where her chest is still wet where he’d put his mouth on her. She pushes into him, rocking against his hand, chasing the feeling.

“Mm,” Chloe says, just barely audible. “Can’t believe it sometimes. Can’t believe I get to have you here.”

He shudders, holds back the pathetic whine building in his throat. She shakes her head against his, licks at the shell of his ear. 

“Lemme hear you, please,” she says, “You always sound so good when you’re falling apart.”

He nearly feels humiliated by how her words make his pulse rush like a drumbeat in his skull, how his throat uncatches and helpless sounds spill from his mouth without measure or control. She’d said she’d been ‘kind of into’ this body when it had been _intimidating_ , living up to the promise of the cruelty of his flesh, and here he is whining into her hair and rutting into her hand. Yet, here she is, telling him she _likes_ that. Something isn’t adding up. Something is wrong. He looks down at himself and no, he is still _this,_ the Devil in her bed, so how can she― _how―_

Her pace is speeding up, the slide and grip of her unmooring him, and he’s lost all interest in holding his hips still. He speeds his hand against her, short sharp anticlockwise circles, the way he knows will make her fall apart the fastest, but he’s becoming increasingly concerned he’s losing the race. Her lips are on his ear, so he can’t miss what she says even when it’s whispered like a secret, every syllable rushing with air.

“You’re so good to me, Lucifer, you don’t even know, I want to make you feel it like you do for me, want to make you feel good.”

Chloe’s babbling a little, now, as if she’s lost the off-switch. Her hand is losing rhythm, increasing in speed, pressure increasing. Every world has melted away but for her and her hand and her words, still whispered despite the hitch in her voice, the tremble of her mouth.

“You close?”

He’s _beyond_ close. 

“Yes,” he gasps out, can’t even match the whispering she’s established, can’t even think of how to _start_ to respond to her, his voice unspooling itself in the new confines of his flesh.

“Good,” she says, matching him for volume. “Want you to.” 

She pulls back, meets him face-to-face. He dips himself to her neck, but she shakes her head. 

“Wanna look at you,” she says. “Please let me see you.”

He’s so far gone that he doesn’t even think about objecting. He only remembers what face she’s looking at when he sees the reflection of a red glow in the wide yawning darkness of her pupils. He has no chance to think about this, though, because she slides one hand lower, pressing against his perineum, speeds the rhythm of her hand on him, and says it so clearly there can be no mistaking it.

“You’re perfect,” Chloe says, no hint of a lie, and her sparkling eyes are so dilated and dark that he sees his Devil face in the reflection of them when she says it, and all of this serves to make it, without a doubt, the _most_ insane thing to have ever taken him over the edge.

He bows into her shoulder as the world spirals downwards and he pulses in her grasp, closing his eyes and canting himself into her. He only has thought enough to keep his hand moving until he hears her gasp. Her hand stills from where she’d been working him through the last of it, her heartbeat stuttering with her breath. He’s already coming down from it, and Chloe’s stilled against him, but he doesn’t dare move. He’s fairly certain he just came while looking at his own face, and _alright,_ he’s enough of a lifelong hedonistic narcissist to admit he’s done that plenty of times before. But _not to that face_. Reality appears to be splitting into fragments. _How did that even happen?_

Chloe runs a hand down his back, humming to herself, tracing the featherless ridge of his wing.

“‘Extraordinarily bad at dirty talk,’” she quotes with amusement, affecting a clipped enunciation clearly meant to mock him. He shakes his head into her shoulder, _yes, yes,_ he takes her point, she’s hilarious, but she has _no idea_ what she’s just done to him, he’s not sure he could _speak_ right now. She snorts. “I oughta make bets with you.”

He drags himself upright, looks at the curling edges of her hair where they’re sticking to the hickey he gave her. He takes a few deep breaths until he’s stopped panting. He doesn’t dare look her in the eye. “I’m fairly certain I could price you out.”

“It’s the only way you’d win. I’m always right, y’know.”

“You’re insane,” he retorts, because he doesn’t know where else to begin. Her hand raises to his chin and lifts it until he’s looking in her eyes. The sun has risen high enough in the sky that her pupils have contracted, and now all he can see is her. 

Her face is blotchily pink, and her smile is open-mouthed and trembling and unthinkingly happy. He has no idea what he looks like right now, and that’s almost certainly for the best, but whatever she sees makes her eyes crinkle at the edges. He leans in, meets her halfway. There’s some poor technique on his part, their teeth click together when he moves forward at the same time she does, but he can’t bring himself to care about whether or not he’s performing at par when he’s not sure how he’s still _here_ right now. He thinks he might be melting. Is he melting? He could be. His body does as it pleases, not that it seems to bother Chloe, _ever_ , bloody _hell_.

“Love you,” she murmurs against his lips. It is a call-and-response, and responding to it is like they are jointly composing a song.

“Love you,” he replies, puts his all into making the words sound as they should for her, and her eyes light up with it. 

“...I do mean it, you know,” she says, looking at him earnestly. He’s not sure which phrase she means, but he knows she does regardless. She’s proved it.

“I believe you,” he says. “I truly, truly do.”

Chloe’s certainty in him could spark life to whole universes. He doesn’t know how to live within it, this ocean of affection, but he’s just about treading water and he hopes he can keep going indefinitely. Her smile, right now, could give light to a galaxy.

“Okay.” 

He nods. He shifts, then glances down. He stills.

“Oh, unbelievable.”

“What?”

He gestures helplessly at himself. “Like a Jackson Pollock on a red canvas. You could sell me at Sotheby’s.” 

He picks up a loosened corner of the bedsheet and cleans off the worst of it, and she laughs at him the entire time. Something has unlatched itself in his head, something taut that’s relaxed instead of snapping. He’s been bunching up the wings, and he lets them stretch out. 

She sprawls back onto the sheets, watching him, idly swiping her hand against the silk. He blinks down at her. She’s supine, naked and resplendent in the pale silver sunlight, and she’s beautiful like this, but something else has caught his attention. He tilts his head and opens his wings a _little_ wider. He checks her eyes. Her storm-grey-blue irises shimmer. Her pupils dilate, just a fraction.

He smirks and settles down, tilts his head a little more, aims for something between imperious and predatory. He doesn’t need a shred of his ability to read her reaction. He spreads and raises his wings, lets them cast a shadow over her skin, and her shiver is not from fear. Her eyes flicker with a faint cast of red. 

“You’re shaking, darling,” he purrs, slowly curving his wings around himself, claw tips whispering over the fabric. Chloe bites the corner of her lip, slowly propping herself onto an elbow, chin tilting up to show more of her neck. 

“Am I?” she challenges. He ghosts a hand over the curve of her waist, not quite touching, and she shivers again. 

“You can’t hide it,” he taunts gently. “I see what you want. I’ve built a kingdom on desire, I have a particular _talent_ for it.” He can see the unnatural jut of his own wings in the black mirror of her pupil: he lifts them and watches as her eye flicks to them, back to him, back to them. He leans into her, over her, lets his wings cage her in as he brings his face close.

“Colour?” He murmurs.

“Green.”

“I’m going to take my time with you,” he whispers in the space between them, and he’s about to say something else similarly brilliant and sexy when she cuts him off by giggling, her hand covering her mouth.

He blinks. 

“Sorry,” she said, “You just. Kind of flapped them when you said that.”

“Sustaining sexual tension really isn’t your forte, is it, Detective?”

She’s still smiling under her hand, he can _see_ she is. “It was just kinda funny was all.”

“Yes, _thank_ you, _you_ try bringing two brand new limbs into the bedroom and see how easy they are to figure out.”

“Pfft.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You did it again.”

“Right, either you stop that or I’m finding something to keep you quiet.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” she says. “Howabout _no_ roleplay this time round, and I call you bird names while you fuck me?”

He doesn’t move, and he also doesn’t go insane and laugh hysterically, but both of them are near things.

“...I’m sorry, come again?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Detective, if you make one more joke I’m going to actually get a ball gag.”

“Not a joke. I mean, not the bird name part. You liked it last night.”

He was hoping, for his sake, neither of them would _ever_ acknowledge it. “Detective, I’m not sure if you _noticed_ what I was going for just now―”

“―Yeah, it was hot, but if you keep doing the flapping thing I _am_ gonna keep laughing, so next time, maybe.”

“... _Next_ time?”

“I mean, if the wings kept happening then this is probably gonna happen more than once, so, yeah. Raincheck.”

“...Just to check what’s happening right now, you want me to stop roleplaying the _only_ thing this body is actually suitable for in a sexual context so that you can say parrot phrases at me.”

“Well gee, with evidence-gathering skills like that, you ought to work in homicide.”

“Did I hit my head earlier this morning?”

“Lucifer.”

“ _I’m not opposed to the idea_ ,” he grates out. The only possible benefit of this face is that she can’t see that his ears are positively burning right now. Love of his life, the only mortal who sees him for who he truly is, and her most notable sexual talent is pinpointing the _stupidest_ ways to bring him to orgasm. He’s either falling for her all over again, or he’s about to lose his mind. Perhaps both. Why not both?

“Okay, then,” she says. “We’re gonna need more lube, though.”

He gets up and walks to the bottle of lube she appears to have hastily discarded on the floor earlier. “You were doing so excellently at sweet nothings before, do you have an on-off switch or something?”

“Get over here, fluffy.”

That should _not_ be a turn-on. She’s broken the Devil. There ought to be laws against this. He’s back a little faster than the laws of physics would deem possible, and instead of seeing the Devil coming for her at an impossible speed and screaming she _laughs_ at him. He scowls.

“Can you _act_ like you’re scared at least? This is starting to get hurtful, I ruled _Hell_ with this face.”

“ _Ruled,_ ” she smirks. “Now you’re all mine.”

He wants to object, but who would object to being in the ownership of Chloe Decker? Safer hands cannot be found. He’s larger than usual, so they fit themselves together at a pace that he would have termed ‘glacial’ if he wasn’t having quite so much fun with it. By the time she’s beneath him and he’s driving into the heat and pressure of her with abandon, she’s just come for the third time and he’s almost entirely forgotten why they were doing this to begin with. 

"Yes, _Lucifer_ , come on," Chloe says beneath him, pulsing around him, face flushed and triumphant. He realises where she's about to go and he can't believe her. He can feel himself corkscrewing towards the end just from a hint of it, why is he _like this_? Chloe's smile becomes wild and open-mouthed. She arches up, grabs the back of his head, drags their faces flush to each other, forehead to forehead.

"Let go, pretty bird."

It ought to be even less sexy than when she did this the first time. Instead, the ridiculous parrot phrase lodges itself somewhere in his spine and spikes white-hot out of him. He pushes himself in deep and emits a sound he thinks he might burst her eardrums with, high and shocked.

He shudders through the last of it. He doesn't feel exhausted or physically overwhelmed, as he usually does when something unexpected brings him to orgasm. He feels fluttery, his wings drawing up and splaying with the incoherent feelings pooling in his gut, his hands clenching the sliding sheets for purchase. His mind is reeling. He gets his mouth under control, drawing back his head to look at her properly as his rhythm stutters and frays, slowing down as he softens.

"You _have_ to find a better nickname," he gasps. Her blue eyes are sunset orange in the shadow of his wings, her toothy smile dark and satisfied. She tilts her head back against the pillow, regards him with her teeth digging slightly into her bottom lip. Her eyes widen and the flash of unreadable emotion in them is painted blood-red by his presence.

"Why?" she asks. He tries to string any words together for a reply but she bulldozes over him, drives her hips up a little, smiles at him teasingly. "You're my pretty bird."

He's not had remotely enough time to get hard again, but that takes him a shocking amount of the way there. He bites back the whine building in his throat, pushes shallowly into her, closes his eyes just to gain back any control over the situation. Small, strong fingers grip his chin.

"Hey, eyes _open_ , pretty bird."

"I'm not a _bird_ ," he snaps, tries to hide the dizzying spin of his head under feigned infuriation, flares his wings as he speaks. When he opens his eyes and notices Chloe's features cast in red, he remembers in horror that he's spreading clawed devil-wing shadows above her as he speaks low and sharp with his face, caging her in like a raptor seizing prey. He folds his wings hastily behind him. Sunlight spreads on her face, her laughter as bright and searing as the star that lights her, and his hazy half-conscious brain recalls that she doesn’t fear him, will never fear him again.

"No, you're not," she agrees, eyes softening from mirth to affection, her hand unreasonably gentle against the scarring of his scalp, his forehead, his cheek. Her other hand bumps against his stomach as it slides between them, feels where they're joined, arches between them as she roves it in circles. "Never said you're a bird, Lucifer, you're a _pretty bird._ "

"That makes no _sense_ ," he whines hopelessly, bolts of lightning sparking down his shaft as her fingers slide to the base of him, rolling his balls in her palm, moving back to her clit. She doesn't give any indication she's heard him, just grinds her hips up into him, into her hand, and moans. He tries to pick up the pace, drives in shallow and fast and high to take her over the edge, but he knows that if she says it again he's gone. He's been party to dirty talk of every sort, in extinct languages, in sultry tones, so why is _this_ the most it's ever affected him? It's a silly-sounding parrot phrase said matter-of-factly at him as they fuck. It's actively _ridiculous_ that it has a shortcut to the base of his skull, the veins in his cock, the air in his lungs.

Chloe drags her eyes over his body, looks somewhere over his shoulder before locking onto his gaze.

"Wings out," she demands, brooking no argument. He flares them up above her. The world goes red and her hand arches and jabs knuckles into his pelvis and loses all rhythm.

"Oh," Chloe manages, throat jumping, her gaze on his wings as she comes. Her eyes flutter shut. She pulses around him, slow and steady. It's not quite enough to take him over, but he thinks that after _that_ , if he doesn't come _now_ , something inside him might snap. He drops his wings low around them and drives into her hard and rhythmless, trembles. The world goes fuzzy with red shadow and gold sunlight, playing on Chloe's face, a living painting, clothed in her light and his shadow as if they are a single inseparable object. He needs her to say it. He wants her to say it.

"Say it," he demands, eyes wide. The flash of teeth in Chloe’s smile could light a supernova. She gives it to him without hesitation, artless and without guile.

"Pretty bird."

The world compresses into a singularity, and it’s all he can do to say its name. He does, and she kisses him.

He’s still riding high on it when he pulls out and collapses down with her, that jittery-muscle spreading warmth, and it’s spiralling together with the certainty of her affection, the knowledge that nothing he can do to himself will make her fear him. He mashes his nose into Chloe's neck, and if she has anything to say about his devil face being this close to her then she ought to have made her complaints before she parrot-talked him _stupid_.

"That's it," he announces. "I give up. You're kinkier than I am, Detective, is that what you want to hear? You maniac of a woman?"

"Bold words from Parrot-Kink Morningstar over there."

He laughs bright and sarcastic into her, palms a breast just to do it. "I wouldn't _have_ a dignity-eroding nickname problem if you didn't coerce me into relationships with half the birds in L.A."

She huffs. "Not my fault."

" _Not your_ ― you _told_ me to do it!"

"And? Not my problem if Big Bird falls in love."

"I googled it," he admits. "Parrots mate for life."

Chloe snorts. "Wait, really?"

"Mm- _hm_."

"Are you _parrot-married_ to Big Bird?"

If he wasn't so fucked-out right now, he might feel more embarrassed. "I'm a parrot _polygamist_ ," he laments, and she giggles wildly against him.

"Oh _no,_ " she says, breaths catching with irrepressible laughter. He closes his eyes, smiling.

"What was it again, Detective? A dozen or so parrots, the randy kookaburra… the _cockatoos_. You'll all just have to share me."

Chloe wriggles an arm out from under him and grips at his back tightly. "Thi―"

She cuts herself off abruptly.

Her hand skates across his back― over his spine, down to his shoulder blades. Her thumb flicks gently against the feathers at the base of his left wing.

He jolts up, props himself on one elbow. She's blinking up at him, he's blinking down at her. He lifts a hand between them, inspects the pink and unmarred skin. Raises it to his face, drags it down the line of his jaw just to feel the stubble. His wings are warm, his gleaming white feathers rustling against the sheets.

"Through the power of parrot love," Chloe murmurs. She's _absurd._ He needs to kiss her _immediately._ He does, and she smiles into it, lifts her hand from his back and scrubs it into his hair.

Chloe flops back onto the bed. “Okay, what was next on the list?”

He drags his hands down his remade face, chuckles helplessly. “It really was only a matter of time before your work ethic made its way to the bedroom, wasn’t it? Give you a mystery to solve…”

“Oh-h, so _that’s_ why you did it.”

“I’d like to think that if I was trying to entice you into daily marathons, I wouldn’t go about doing it by turning myself into new fun shapes in the morning. Or at _least_ not cry every half-hour while doing it.”

“Didn’t cry this time.”

He sighs. “Now isn’t _that_ a ringing endorsement. I should get it printed on cards. Lucifer Morningstar, doesn’t _always_ cry during sex.”

“Hey.” Chloe rolls over and catches his wrist, meets his gaze solemnly. “I’m really glad you trusted me for that. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

That same part of him that folded in earlier folds in now. It’s still hard not to follow the instinct of brushing these comments off, but he’s found the path, however narrow and precarious, to letting them in.

“I’ll try,” he murmurs. She rolls back but doesn’t let go of his wrist, her fingers slowly kneading in circles over the skin.

“Sex, shower, drinks, grooming, restaurant,” she recites. He groans.

“I think after the last twelve hours of my life, that grooming session might actually _kill_ me.”

* * *

It doesn’t, as it turns out. After a long and somewhat _distracting_ shower, they find themselves back on the balcony. The morning sky is uncharacteristically grey, the air cool and damp. Neither of them bothered to dress: his tailors, the most discreet dry cleaners’ that his tailors know, and the most vaguely legal industrial chemicals that money can buy have finally found a substance that can’t be cleaned out of fabric. He takes one look at the blankets, glances over the railing, and bundles them all over the edge before Chloe can stop him.

“ _Hey!_ ”

“I am _not_ handing those to a dry cleaner’s,” he says. “The substance on them can destroy all known machinery.”

“Have you heard of throwing things _out_?”

He points to where he’s done exactly that.

She groans, rolls her eyes. “You are _unbelievable_.”

The blankets took the worst brunt of feathers and bodily fluids, but the concrete floor of the balcony is starting to take on the appearance of having been varnished with gold lacquer. At this point, trying to find a spot that _isn’t_ shiny in the sun is the challenge. He spreads his wings to catch the sun and tilts them so the light shines on the concrete: Chloe screws up her face and throws a hand over her eyes.

“If I wanted a disco floor,” he muses in annoyance, “I would have damn well installed one.”

Chloe grimaces into the light. “Yeah, and if I’d wanted a _disco ball for a partner_ I wouldn’t have Wikipedia’d wing preening in the first place.”

“It’s still _not_ preening, I’m not a bloody chicken.”

“ _Quit_ the light show or I’m going to show you what I do to a Thanksgiving turkey.”

He folds them down, chuckling as she lowers her hand to glare at him. “Ooh, and here I thought you’d already put the baster in today.”

Her lips twitch and her nose wrinkles up in poorly concealed amusement. “On the ground, Lucifer.”

He drops down, cross-legged, and spreads out his wings, tipping them down so that they won’t shine too bright for her to see what she’s doing. Even in spite of his efforts, even with the pale sunlight this morning, the golden light that refracts on Chloe's skin makes her glow. She suits the light of divinity far better than his feathers ever did.

It’s strange, how easy it’s starting to feel. The memories of star-silver skies and impassive careful hands, the cold eternal void of Hell’s ash in his feathers, wash away from the experience every time that he and Chloe sit in earthly sunlight. The polluted air of Los Angeles washes over him, rustles into his feathers, swirls against his skin.

The first time that Chloe’s hand had made contact with his feathers, comparing him flippantly to a Muppet, he’d frozen. Any touch at all had come to signify cool metal coming to rest against his skin, the need not to struggle. When grooming had begun in earnest, when the spike of touch became a rolling unending thunder, it had been close-on to unbearable. Every touch had been a lightning strike down his spine, a flood of unformed sensation. As she had started to run oil over his feathers, time had collapsed into a circle. He had been in Los Angeles and he had been in the Silver City. He had become a black hole compressing into an event horizon. He’d felt transformed into a former self, brittle, falling ever down. In her presence, she caught him: her hands, her voice, her arms around his. He’s so accustomed to his own mutability that her immutable surety is the only thing he can rely on to keep him from unwinding. He had held on in the storm, and she hadn’t let go.

After _that_ , the overwhelming sensation untangled itself into arousal, and hadn’t that been _something._ He isn’t sure he’s ever given her instruction on how to do this properly: he’s just been letting her do whatever she damn well pleases, so long as it keeps her hands on his feathers.

It had gone surprisingly well, regardless. He’d nearly forgotten how it felt to shine in the sunlight. Or, to a lesser extent, how it felt to come untouched a half-dozen times in a row. He’s as experienced a lover as it gets, but very few mortal desires involve standing around idly while the other person gets some; and while he’s always been happy to let an enthusiastic sadist have at him, the lack of pain or potential for damage had never really made it all that titillating for him.

Still, not _entirely_ new. There have been moments, and he’s enjoyed them. Chloe’s determination to do so _because_ he’d enjoy it is… _that’s_ the new part. He’s not sure he’d forget it if he had a hundred billion years of life without it. Which he’ll have to, in time.

Chloe, who apparently isn’t thinking about the distant reaches of an immortal lifespan, interrupts.

“I think I pulled some out of alignment yesterday, so, uh… gonna try and smooth those back in. Let me know if I do it wrong.”

Usually, when his feathers move out of sorts, he just runs the shower head over them for a nauseatingly long time until they mostly go back in place. Having someone he trusts do this for him is such a novelty that he couldn’t give a damn if she pulled them out entirely.

“Have at me.”

Her hands come to rest on his shoulders, but they don’t stay still for long. If he thinks back to sense memories of the Silver City, he thinks of hands picking over his coverts with deliberation, going over the layers again and again to lay each feather precisely in its place. It is nothing like this with her. Chloe doesn’t limit her hands to his wings, nor concern herself with precision. She’ll rove deft hands across his chest, his back, as readily as his wings. She’ll card his feathers into the right direction, and then lets them settle where they will. Chloe always concerns herself with a timely result, not an ideal one.

Her hand rests on the wrist of his wing.

It’s strange: for the first time, the pressure of her hand does not come with the commensurate sting of oversensitivity. Her skin, still a little damp from the shower, is cold. He can feel her thumb dragging against a feather, but her fingers have burrowed beneath them to rest directly on his skin. It ought to feel like more than this.

Yet, it almost feels… _normal_.

He frowns. He pushes his wing into her hand. With a little added pressure, the jolt of arousal returns. When he relaxes, the feeling becomes mundane once more. She runs her thumb gently against a feather, carding it into place. Last night, even that would have been enough to stir him, but today the sensation is dulled. Not distant: merely... normal.

“You okay?”

“I am,” he replies, because he is. It’s _strange_ that he is. She huffs out a breath and runs her hand slowly along him, her touch heavy enough to press each feather flush to his skin.

After some thought, he finds he doesn’t have to guess at what’s happened. A few million years of becoming unused to touch, a few hours with the hands of Chloe Decker: one outbalances the other immeasurably. With last night, with this morning, the afterglow and the certainty of their mutual affection… His wings had never been innately sensitive to touch, simply unused to it. The blinding light of a dawning sun, as it were, is fading to a hazy and pleasant morning. 

Her hand passes over a preen gland to collect oil. Alright, it’s not _wholly_ faded yet. Certainly still an _involved_ feeling, but not in the least overwhelming.

She makes her way slowly and methodically across his left wing and then his right, laying feathers straight, marking them with oil; and he does not feel as if he will tear apart into pieces, or come unmoored with the sensation of it. He is grounded and calm. He trusts her to take care of him.

He notices her eyes, occasionally, flicking to his. If she’s looking for what he thinks she is, she never says anything: he has to assume that means nothing’s happening, but he finds that he couldn’t care less if his entire face changed, so long as she keeps her hands on him. It’s arousing, still, but mostly it just feels _nice_. His eyes get heavy with it, his muscles unspool, his head weighs down on his neck. Scant weeks ago, a hand this close to the base of his wing would have only signalled the imminent scalding touch of steel into skin. This morning, he lets his eyes close, head tilt. He surrenders to the feeling, the ebb and flow of dullness and sensation. The glorious mundanity of Sunday morning.

“You falling asleep on me?” Her voice is amused, but not mocking.

“Mm. Yes. Feels nice.”

“’Kay. Almost done.”

She pats him. He forces his heavy eyes open, stretches. She squeaks in surprise, and he blinks back at her.

Where he’s stretched his wing directly into her, pushing her backwards into the penthouse window. She sways and steadies herself, blinks at him incredulously. He folds them close, huffs at himself in surprise. He’d relaxed so much into the feeling that—

Well. 

He’d just forgotten they were out at all.

“Sorry,” he says easily. “You were in the way.”

Chloe rolls her eyes. “Oh, yeah, now I’m _done_ , it’s ‘you’re in the way’.”

He smiles. He could get used to this. 

_He could get used to this_. 

“Shouldn’t someone in your line of work have better reflexes? If a wall of feathers is coming right at you, the smart thing to do is _duck.”_

“Was that pun even on purpose?”

“Was wh―… You can’t prove it _wasn’t_.”

“You’re a literal birdbrain.”

“Right, that’s it. That’s the last bird joke you get away with.” He stands up, grinning. 

“Wait, what do you mean, what are you t― Lucifer no, _no_ , _ah-ah-ah-ah_ _no_! We are _both_ naked―”

“―Nobody will see―”

“― _It’s the middle of the day―”_

“―Go on, live a little, Detective, you don’t want to fly?”

Chloe narrows her eyes, wriggles out of his grip. “Not if I end up topless on TMZ, I don’t.”

He sighs. “In the event that someone caught video evidence of the Devil flying over Los Angeles, you think they’d sell it to TMZ?”

“If your ass was in shot, yeah. It’s L.A.”

“So it’s a no on flying, then.”

“On naked flying, you _bet_ it’s a no. ‘Sides, don’t you still have something on your list?”

“I’m going to assume you’ll say we can’t fly naked to the restaurant either.”

“You’re really hitting it out of the park today, Detective Morningstar.”

He sighs again. “The sacrifices I make for you, Detective. I _suppose_ we can wear clothes to the restaurant.”

“And _drive_.”

“Very perceptive of you.”

“Asshole.”

* * *

The cold light of the morning has formed into an extraordinarily un-Californian grey sky, but he’s left the top down just to feel the wind in his hair. Even the unusual weather can’t dampen his spirits. When your partner is a workaholic with childcare responsibilities, the odds of ever making it to one of his perennial reservations were so low that he’d happily bet against them. Sunday, it seemed, was for once a day that held good portent.

Weather aside, that is. It’s cooler than usual. They might have to chase a storm back home.

Chloe frowns down at her phone. “You sure this place is good? Its Yelp page is kind of busted.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it, Detective. It’s extremely exclusive, they don’t take kindly to walk-ins.”

“…Okay, Lucifer, I’m going to need you to define ‘don’t take kindly’, because some of these reviews? Border on horror stories. This one talks about the cook wielding a baseball bat.”

He smiles. “Jessica is a wonder of a pastry chef.”

“That doesn’t even come close to answering— oh hey, look.”

She points, and he follows her finger. It’s a rather familiar veterinary practice, coming up on their left.

“Oh, wonderful, let’s stop by and net ourselves some parrot fricassee.”

“Ha _ha_ — Um. _Lucifer_.”

He sees what she’s looking at. The car park outside of the practice is empty, except for a white rental van and a figure wearing a balaclava. In their hands, there’s a large wire cage. In the cage, there’s a crumpled ball of blue-and-gold feathers, lying prone on the metal base.

He hits the accelerator and swings sharply into the turn-in, brakes where he’ll be in the way of any hasty egress. The masked man stares at them in horror and throws the cage into the back of the van, slamming the doors shut and rushing for the driver’s seat.

He intercepts the masked figure with a hand to the back of his balaclava, ripping it off as he pushes the birdnapper by the shoulders into the side of the van. The face underneath is surprisingly familiar.

“Good afternoon, Timothy,” he smiles. Tim, sweating and squirming in his grip, blinks between him and Chloe in a sort of dawning fear. “I won’t say I haven’t fantasised of killing that misuse of Celestial biology myself, but I have to say I expected better from a man who endures them daily.”

Tim gapes. “What? _No._ No! He’s fine!” He turns his head desperately to Chloe. “You can look yourself, he’s just sleeping.”

“Oh, does he only nod off to a man in a ski mask putting him in a rental van, then?”

Tim squirms again. “He’s _fine, I swear_! I’m taking him back to the aviary.”

“Really now. Shall we see?”

He keeps Tim pinned to the side of the van: the hand not grabbing his shoulders is blocking him from running, his palm flat on the metal. He feels it buckle a little under him and eases up on the pressure: no use breaking anything until he has his answer. He fixes his gaze on Tim, lets the power flow.

“What is it you desire?”

Tim’s face goes slack. Good, at least his mojo doesn’t exclusively work on birds now. “I… I want to keep Big Bird safe.”

He blinks. Perhaps it is in some way bird-exclusive. “What? Wh— Actually, you know what? Go right ahead, _keep talking,_ why on Earth would you _want_ that horny feather duster to be safe?”

He puts enough into the question that Tim still seems entranced into the answer: he’s speeding up, getting frantic, but the words are flying from him with abandon. “I worked there when I was a student! Big Bird was just… smarter than the other birds, you know? Most of them were happy being cooped up in those regulation cages but Big Bird was _miserable_! I taught him words and songs and tricks to enrich him, put in endless requests for larger cages than that wheeled monstrosity they kept him in, but once I left and started work I knew they’d just forget about him, and I’ve tried to just ignore it over the years but it breaks my _heart_ that they leave him like that! He can’t even fly in there! I have to preen him every vet visit because he’s so depressed he won’t do it himself!”

He’s struck with the sudden and horrifying thought that he’s about to experience empathy for Big Bird, which will be a new low point for his future therapy sessions. Thankfully, Chloe pushes close and intervenes before he can start to make any lasting associations between himself and a bloody _macaw_.

“You killed Sam Lionel to take Big Bird back?”

Tim’s eyes go wide and round. “No! Of course not! That was— I didn’t— It just _happened!_ ”

“It just _happened_?”

“Look, he was a new night shift guy, alright? I saw him every time I came in for morning appointments, he’d been there maybe six months and half the time I’d walk in and he’d be closing some porno on the work computer and zipping up his pants. And the last guy in Big Bird’s office had been a real hard-ass, so I thought it was an opportunity, okay, I just didn’t think that— I just thought it would be _easy,_ okay? You know, go in, get Big Bird, get out.”

He grips Tim’s shoulder harder. “And the fire axe just _happened_ to split his skull, did it now?”

Tim writhes with guilt, wide eyes tearing up. “I watched it, it was— it was horrible, he— I _drugged_ him, alright? We keep tranqs in the office for chimps and tigers and stuff, I dosed it out, I sneaked in while he was— distracted— but he freaked out when I jabbed him and he came at me and I fell and he knocked open— he knocked open the cage and Big Bird— Big Bird was scared, he didn’t know! He just flew right out and into the wall and he knocked off the— the guy was so incompetent he was keeping the axe on the— the top she-shelf—”

Tim’s eyes are starting to get wet. He hates it when they cry, there’s just _so much_ proximity between a good shirt and a wet face right now.

Chloe’s face is scrunching up in confusion. “Wait, so… Big Bird knocked the— _Big Bird killed Sam Lionel_?”

Tim shakes his head rapidly, tears starting to fall. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen! I’m just trying to— Let him go— Everyone just _freaked out_ —”

Chloe gestures at him to let Tim go; he’s heard enough too, and the shirt-to-wet proximity is starting to make him uncomfortable, so he backs up and lets her do as she does best.

“Tim Furness, you’re under arrest—”

Tim shakes his head, quailing into the van like he might be able to phase into it. Tim’s going to be one of those ones, then. He really hopes he doesn’t cry the entire way to the precinct. “No, please, it wasn’t _me_ —”

Chloe attempts to press on. “—For the—"

Tim flails out at Chloe. He’s seen this reflexive response to arrest enough that he gets between them immediately, but he expects a fist to hit his chest or a kick to the groin, not a sharp scratch into his neck. He grunts and slams Tim into the van, Tim falls hard, and Chloe spins around them both and presses a knee into the small of Tim’s back. She clips handcuffs over Tim’s wrists as he whimpers and yells incoherently, and where was she keeping _those_? What plan did she have for the restaurant that she had handcuffs on her person? He really ought to ask, he might be able to convince her into some mid-meal restaurant bathroom roleplay. He opens his mouth to ask, and is suddenly struck by the fact that standing up is _much_ more of a challenge than it was five seconds ago. He raises a hand to his neck and pulls out the empty syringe.

Ah. Now was that the dosage for a parrot or for a tiger? No matter, even with the Detective’s proximity it certainly won’t be enough for a Devil. Chloe’s still reciting the Miranda warning, but her voice is tricky to lock onto over the rush of what he thinks might be his pulse. She looks up at him and frowns.

“—Lucifer? I said, can you help me get him up?”

He blinks slowly. He takes a careful step forward, and finds he really has to concentrate to make the flat of his foot hit the ground and not his ankle. He holds up the syringe.

Chloe blanches. “Oh shit. I’m calling—”

“No need, Detective,” he interjects, mustering several millennia of experience with the slow and hazy feeling of falling inside of himself. He pushes it down to look clear-eyed and confident. “I’m perfectly fine.”

He demonstrates by walking forward and starting to yank Tim upright. Then upright seems to become more sky than ground, and he’s looking into it, pain blooming in the back of his skull. He frowns. When did that happen?

“Lucifer!”

He sits up. Tim’s landed face-down on the ground again, and Chloe’s left the vet sprawled out and handcuffed to go to him instead, cupping his face in her hand. He resists the urge to tilt his head into her palm. He closes his eyes, scrunches them up, and opens them again. Oh dear, everything’s definitely verging on the edge of fuzzy.

“Mostly fine,” he amends, rubbing a palm against the tarmac. The rough surface feels dull and rounded under the dead weight of his flesh. Was the sky always this grey in Los Angeles? He could have sworn it was blue, once. He glances back at Chloe to find her hand gone from his face. She’s making a phone call, which he didn’t notice her starting to do. He has to squint to hear it. She’s flicking her eyes between him and the Corvette.

“—yeah, drive _faster_. No, don’t call an— no. He’s fine, he’s just fallen over, no hospital needed, I just don’t think he can— yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, good. I’ll see you in five.”

She hangs up and puts her hand on his shoulder. He wishes the hand was back on his face. He tilts his head a little, but she doesn’t take the hint.

“Lucifer, you still with me?”

“Crystal clear,” he says. Right now she’s never been clearer. Her eyes are the bluest thing he’s ever seen. Even the grey skies can’t douse them.

“Uh-huh. Okay, Lucifer, I’ve got a couple cars coming our way, they’re gonna pick this up so I can get you back to Lux and you can sober up. You think you can make it to the passenger seat?”

He frowns. “It’s _my_ car, why would I go in the passenger seat?”

Chloe glares. “Because you’re so out of it you can barely _walk_ right now.”

She has a fair point. His legs feel much longer than he remembers them being. It’s like someone’s bolted a few extra meters onto them. He might hit the wrong pedals.

“Righto.”

“Lucifer?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Can you get up?”

“Of course,” he says, getting up. Everything spins unusually, and then there’s a small forceful push coming from one side, and he’s up, mostly. Chloe groans beside him, one of his arms swung over her shoulder.

“Okay, okay, just— take a step—”

He focuses very hard. He takes a step. Then another. The car is extremely far away, at least five steps, but they make it in only a few microseconds. That’s impressive. Chloe bundles him into the passenger seat with a mutter of ‘tallest asshole in the world’. He watches as she walks away. He hopes she won’t leave him there. He stares, just to make sure. She loves him, he knows that, but just to make sure. Uniformed cops arrive, take a statement, frown over at him. Chloe waves her hands and says something confidently and they take Tim and the van and they’re gone in the blink of an eye. The sky is awfully grey. Why is it so grey? He frowns up at the sky as Chloe takes the driver’s seat, turning on the engine. He instinctively goes for the clutch. Where is it? Oh, he’s in the passenger’s seat. Okay. Chloe’s saying something. He focuses very hard on what she’s saying.

“—got it?”

He nods. He absolutely has. “Yes.”

They pull back onto the road. He frowns.

“Do a U-turn, Detective, the restaurant’s the other way.”

Chloe frowns. “Lucifer, we’re going to _Lux_. Remember? You’re _drugged,_ we need to get you somewhere you can sober up.”

“Oh, got it.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes, absolutely, drive on.”

He feels something patter his forehead. He frowns up at the sky. Is it starting to rain? Another drop hits his nose, and then another spatters his hand. It _is_ starting to rain, and judging from the bloody great stormclouds overhead, it’s about to absolutely chuck it down. The top’s down, Chloe’s going to get soaked.

“Okay, so just gonna repeat myself,” Chloe says, “Just in case you didn’t hear last time, we’re going to go back to the penthouse, and then you are going to sit down, and I am going to drive a couple blocks away and come back and you are gonna stay _put_ until I get back. Repeat that back to me so I know you’ve heard me. …Lucifer? _Lucifer?! Lucifer no, stop, no!”_

He knows why she’s angry, because she’s complained often enough when he leans over and obscures her view of the wing mirrors, so this is that in reverse. He raises the left wing enough to still cover her from rain but not drape into the mirror on her side. His wings are already starting to strain, he’s having to hunch over a bit in his seat just to raise them high enough, but the rain _is_ starting to come down in earnest now, so it was excellent timing on his part. Chloe swerves on the road.

“ _Lucifer! Put your wings in! We’re in public!_ ”

He laughs. He’s not sure why, something about that just seems funny. He can find the dirty joke there if he thinks about it hard enough. Chloe swerves all over the place again. Behind them, he can hear a beeping horn.

“Lucifer, _please_ put them away! Right now! _Lucifer_!”

She must not have noticed. Excellent, he must have gotten them out in good time. He can feel the patter of rain against his coverts, but the preen oil is doing a marvellous job: for the first time in a very long time, his feathers aren’t getting damp in the rain. The water’s just rolling right off.

“Detective,” he assures her, his tongue starting to feel heavy in his mouth, “It’s raining.”

“ _What?!_ ”

Yes, she hadn’t noticed at all. Brilliant work. He nods at the water sluicing off his wings onto the road. “Raining. See?”

“ _What are you even talking a_ — oh. Oh no you are so high right now. Lucifer, uh, thank you, you’re really sweet, but—”

He smiles. ‘Sweet’ isn’t something he’d typically take as a compliment, but she’s teaching him a lot about how to perceive himself. If his devil face can be used for pleasure, maybe he can also be ‘sweet’. He’ll learn along with her.

“—alright? …Lucifer, you hearing me? Lucifer? _Luci_ — Holy shit okay, okay, uh, not going on the freeway, shit, uh—”

The car takes a sharp right turn, and the busy Sunday roads erupt in a cacophony of beeps as Chloe rattles the Corvette down a narrow side street. He watches with fascination as a small torrent of water slides from the surface of the wing he’s raised above himself, splattering a mirror as he tilts inside the car. Chloe’s fumbling with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on a phone. She hits a contact, puts the phone on the dashboard, and swings the car down another road. The phone dials and picks up in seconds.

“It’s me,” Chloe says. “Are you home? Is Trixie back from ‘Frozen 2’ yet?”

The voice over the phone is tinny, and he strains to hear it over the rustle of his wings and the sounds of engine and rainfall. Distantly, he hears a clash of thunder.

“I— what— yeah, no, I’m home but Trixie’s— she’s still there with her friends, should I— is everything alright? Are you okay?”

Chloe takes a sharp right turn and the phone skitters across the dashboard.

“Lucifer’s been dosed with something and I can’t get him back to mine or Lux, I’m a half mile out from yours and I _need_ to get him somewhere safe _right now_.”

Silence over the line.

The voice is low and pained. “Right.”

“Dan, please.”

“…Is he dangerous?”

“He’s using his wings as a _beach umbrella_ right now, he’s not— _No!_ He’s _not_ dangerous!”

“Wings? Wait, Chlo, Lucifer has _wings_?”

At the sound of his name, he loses his focus on holding his wings in place, blinking down at the phone. Oh, he knows that voice.

“Hello, Daniel!”

“…Hi?”

He smiles. “It’s raining.”

Chloe makes a strange noise. “Dan, _please_.”

He looks at Chloe. Her blue eyes are dark in the storm, but the shadowy inside of his wing is nestled into her head, feathers flush to her hair, and it’s hard to tell where he ends and she begins. He smiles and speaks up for Dan’s benefit. He can make an easy correction to this misconception. He trusts her words can assuage his reputation, once and for all.

“The Detective said I’m ‘very sweet’!”

“ _Dan, please_.”

“…You gotta be fast, Chlo, Trixie’s film is supposed to end at six.”

“We will be very fast, _thank you_ , I’m _almost_ there, just— be waiting outside, okay? I barely got him _in_ the car, I’m _not_ gonna get his lanky ass out of it.”

“You owe me for this.”

“Get outside, now!”

Chloe screeches the Corvette to a halt, and he tilts forward with the sudden braking force. They must have been going fast. He hadn’t even noticed. He blinks up at Chloe as she gets out of the driver’s seat and crosses over to his side, opening his door. He raises one wing over her the best he can; it’s getting a little tricky, he mostly droops it on top of her. She grimaces as she loops one of his arms over her shoulders.

Dan emerges from nowhere. His eyes are extremely wide. He speaks so fast it’s almost impossible to make out. “Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee—”

“—Stop that, help me get him in before anyone else gets their damn cameraphone out—”

“—Chloe he has _wings_ —”

“—Yeah I _know_ , Dan—”

“—Like actual wings like holy shit they’re glowing, Chloe, like an angel, _because he’s a fallen angel because he’s the Devil oh my God_ hail Mary full of—"

“— _Dan, stop it!_ Stop it with the Devil stuff! Think of it like he’s like a big heavy goddamn chicken, okay? They’re reflective, anyway, not _glowing_ , he’s a big shiny bird and he’s high as a kite and he needs to sober up inside right now before anyone else can drive by and see, okay? _Okay_? That help? _Now help me!_ ”

Chloe tries to stand up, but his arm’s still around her shoulders so she doesn’t get very far. He looks down at the ground and tries to stand, and the pavement comes remarkably close before swaying back again. He blinks over at Dan, who’s slung his other arm over his surprisingly strong shoulders.

“What did he _take_?” Dan says. He notices the raindrops sliding down Dan’s face, and manages to get his other wing onto Dan’s head, who yelps. The house is getting closer, although he isn’t entirely certain how.

“Suspect got him with something,” Chloe says nervously. She disappears from view as they make it to the doorframe: Dan drags him forward and he feels someone folding and manhandling his wings through the double doors and then both doors shut behind them and they’re inside. He plops down onto the staircase: standing is difficult, and his wings are very heavy now, so he sprawls them up the stairs and lies back as far as he can. It’s very nice to lie down. He might stay like this. He shuts his eyes.

“They think he’s a chicken too?”

“Arrested Tim Furness, he had a syringe on him, I think it’s like the tranqs they use on tigers? Lucifer, do _not_ go to sleep right now, up, get up.” He feels a hand on his arm pulling him and he goes with it, blinks up at her sleepily. Dan is pacing the ground in front of them both.

“Then why is he _here_? He should be in a hospital or something, or, I don’t know, the Alien mother cocoon he sleeps in or something, _anywhere_ other than _here_.”

Chloe groans. “Because he’s so out of it he won’t put his wings back in and I can’t take him on the freeway if he’s going to go loopy and _take off_ , Dan, not to mention I can’t take _proof of an entire religion to a hospital, Dan!”_

She seems a bit stressed. He raises a hand to cup her jaw, except he misses a bit and puts his entire palm on her face instead. He lowers it again. They’re out of the car, but everything’s still moving.

“…Chlo, he can’t stay here long, we have to get him out before Trixie gets back.”

“I know, I know, I—” Chloe’s tapping rapid-fire on her phone.

“Is— _are you on Wikipedia right now?!”_

“Do you have some secret massive-dose-of-horse-tranquiliser book I don’t know about, Dan?! …Okay, apparently cold water— helps, to get people to shock out of it and stay awake. Submerging them in water. He’s got a fast metabolism. It’ll work. It’s gonna work. Help me get him upstairs.”

Staying awake seems like a terrible idea right now. He’d much rather go to sleep. Unfortunately, Chloe and Dan practically drag him up the stairs, his legs doing very little to help, so he doesn’t get an awful lot of say in the matter. He’s left in the corridor upstairs as the two of them rush in and out, bags of ice emerging from the staircase and disappearing through a door.

He stares at the opposite wall of the corridor, his legs out in front of him. His feet are perfectly flat against the other side of the corridor. It’s like it was made for him. Well, no, actually that can’t be true, because he’s currently wearing shoes. Would he still fit so perfectly if his shoes were off? His shoelaces seem to be gaining knots rather than losing them, so he rips the laces into shreds so he can take his shoes off. He squints down the corridor, which is several miles long, and aims the shoe at the coat hook at the end. He hits it dead-on, but he manages to knock the coat hook off the wall in the process.

“Lucifer, you alright?”

He turns his attention back to whether or not his legs fit the corridor perfectly with his shoes off. He doesn’t. That’s a shame. He lets his head drop back against the wall. It’s like being caressed by a cloud. His head wants to float off his shoulders. His wings are slumped into the carpet. His arms are limp in his lap. He sighs in contentment. This is the most comfortable he’s ever been.

“Lucifer?”

Footsteps from the bathroom, far away. He turns.

There she is. She’s breathtaking. Incredible. Spectacular. Her shirt is damp from rain, clinging to the gentle curve of her waist. She’s giving him that look she gives him sometimes, when she’s going to handcuff him or lock him in a car or shoot him. He picks his head up, smiles at her. His head tilted so fast! How did that happen?

“L’v’y’u,” he says. His mouth is a lot looser than he remembers it being. The world is going so fast around them, it’s like living inside a carousel. It’s glorious. Dan appears, on both sides of Chloe. He shakes his head, rights it from where it’s drooped, and Dan is now only on Chloe’s left. How fascinating. He should probably be specific, in case Daniel takes the wrong idea from what he just said. He raises his finger and points, approximately where he believes Dan to be currently standing. Dan appears to have made his way across the miles between here and the coat hook, because he’s picking it up and staring between the shoe on the floor and the hole in the wall.

“N’t you,” he says. Dan turns to him and stares. He swings his finger over to Chloe, who has somehow walked across the room already. How is she so fast? She’s amazing. “You. L’v you.”

Chloe’s face makes an interesting new expression. He wonders what this one means. “Yes, I— yes, Lucifer, I love you too—”

His smile threatens to explode off his face. _She loves him. He loves her._ How he had never known it could be like this?

“—But right now I need you to… Lucifer, can you put your wings in? Hey, Lucifer, look at me. Look at me.”

She snaps her fingers and he follows the sound.

“Mm?”

“Lucifer, we need to get you in the bathtub and we can’t do that if your wings are out, they’re too big. I need you to put them away, okay? Just for now. It’s not raining in here, so you can put them in now. So we can get you in the bathtub.”

He concentrates as hard as he can on her words. Something about his wings being big. They are absolutely massive, aren’t they, compared to Daniel’s tiny mortal home? She needs him. He needs to get in the bathtub. Just for now. She needs him to get in the bathtub.

“Lucifer, Lu— no no _no no no_ —”

Chloe lurches forward as he stands, one hand pushing against his chest. His limbs are a lot floppier than he remembers them being. He can’t quite tell, but Dan seems to be circling him. Or Chloe’s circling him? It’s hard to tell. Oh no, actually, _he’s_ moving. He’s walking to the bathroom, of course. She needs him to get in the bathtub.

“Lucifer _stop_ , you’re going to—”

Getting through tiny human doorframes can be tricky with a seventeen-foot wingspan, and he feels like he must have gained a few more wings than he remembers having because it takes ages to get through. They’ve already run the bath for him, how nice. He ought to say so, but his tongue feels a little uncooperative and he’s not sure where they’ve gone anyway. He fumbles for his waistcoat buttons, and decides that they must have been glued to the fabric because they’re refusing to release. Ah well, there’s a simpler solution than undressing.

He starts getting into the bath, and because the world is spinning a little too quickly to really see where exactly the bathtub is from second to second, he does it wrong, and suddenly _all_ of him is in the bathtub, and—

He sputters his head out of the freezing cold water, flailing as he goes underwater again. His wings are too big to help any with righting him, but he _does_ manage to whap them painfully between the bathwater and the ceiling several times in a row. Everything clatters around him, something smashing. He hears Chloe yelp. He scrambles his arms and legs underneath him to stop himself from drowning face-first in the overfull tub. He gasps for air.

Chloe’s backed herself into the bathroom sink. She’s damper than when he saw her last. Dan, white-knuckling the bathroom doorframe, seems to have gone for a simultaneous impromptu swim. There are bottles and hair mousses and toothbrushes all over the floor, along with what he has to presume _was_ the shower curtain, which has clattered to the floor along with some plaster and smashed tiles. 

His suit is clinging to his skin, tight and cooling, as the ice-cold water leaches heat from his skin. The shock of the water has pressed pause on the spinning Earth. As the adrenaline rush fades, it leaves a bleary sort of clarity in its place.

Oh, _bloody hell_. What was _in_ that syringe? Do they have elephants at that practice? He drags himself to a kneel in the tiny bathtub, wincing as one wing folds uncomfortably behind him into the cold tiled wall.

“Ow.”

Dan is doing an interesting impression of a rabbit that’s stuck in several headlights at once.

“You’re paying for that,” he says, jerking his hand to the wall, his voice high and tight.

He follows Dan’s hand. Where the shower curtain had once been, there’s now a substantial dent in the wall going almost completely through to the other side, surrounded by cracked tiles. He turns his head over his shoulder, looks to where the wrist of a wing feels sore: the feathers are coated in plaster dust and tile fragments. He licks his lips a few times, gets his brain to move in tandem with his tongue.

“Will do,” he murmurs. He lifts a dripping hand from the water and scrubs it over his face, lets the cold water seep into his cheeks. He returns his hand beneath the water: it feels a million miles away from his body. He takes a deep breath. 

The shock to his system’s sobered him up a little, but he’s now painfully aware of how _not_ sober he is. His depth perception is completely shot, he’s swaying in place with the effort to stay upright, and his head is swirling uncooperatively. He’s not averse to letting himself relax into this sort of sensation, and he would if it was just him and Chloe, but he’s at Dan’s house, in Dan’s _bathtub_ , destroying Dan’s property. He really ought to get out of here before this can get violent. He tries to get a sense of where all six of his limbs are, attempts to fold his wings behind himself and heave himself out of the tub, but Chloe rushes forward and puts a hand on the soaked padding of his suit jacket, pushing him gently back down.

“Hey, don’t move too fast, okay? You need to take a moment.”

“Mm-hm,” he says. He removes his hands from the edge, settles his wings uncomfortably behind the tub, folds his legs back under him and kneels back down. “Righto.”

Her hand slides to his bicep, her fingers solid and immutable as iron. His eyes will just about focus now: he focuses them on her. Chloe smiles at him sympathetically.

“You okay?”

He takes stock of himself, physically looking up and down.

“Nothing broken, Detective.” He looks up at the wall. “Well… apart from Daniel’s home.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Chloe says. Behind her, Dan makes a pained noise. “I guess cold water _does_ help, yeah?”

“Mm,” he replies, nodding fractionally so his brain doesn’t tilt too much in his skull. His tongue is heavy in his mouth. Everything feels heavy, really. He blinks, slow and deliberate, trying to get his body back under control. He’s getting _unspeakably_ cold in here, but at least it’s helping him along towards clear-headedness. Vulnerability is truly something. He sits in silence, lets the cold leach into his head.

Chloe runs a warm hand back through his hair, fingers curling against his scalp. His head follows her hand, tipping heavily backwards, before he remembers their audience and rights himself abruptly. He takes another breath, focuses on the cold water, the slowly returning clarity. He blinks up at Dan, who takes a tentative step forward towards them.

“Yeah,” Dan says, stress threaded into his voice, “Don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal.”

He’s not sure what to say to that, so he stares at Dan while he thinks about it. Dan shifts his weight, tiles crunching beneath him, before breaking eye contact to bend down and pick up a toothbrush from the floor.

He decides on what to say.

“Sorry,” he says. “I _will_ pay for it.”

Dan continues to pick up bottles. Chloe’s looking between them with interest.

Dan eventually speaks. His voice is slow and quiet. “I know, man. You’re like the richest guy in L.A.”

He challenges his hazy brain by adding up the current value of his liquid and illiquid assets. “World.”

Chloe blinks. “What was that?”

“Richest in the _world_. I think. Don’t know where the record stands at the moment. But I don’t believe I’ve been beaten yet.”

Dan’s righted himself to stare. His eye is twitching. “…You’re the richest person in the world?”

“Not a person,” he says automatically, before wincing a little with the memory of a gun pointed at his chest. Best to keep the not-human reminders to a minimum until he’s sure he can fend off an attack. “Mm. Yes. Three hundred forty-two, six hundred eleven, and sixty-seven thousand… and three-hundred and seventy-four and eighty-nine cents.”

Chloe blinks rapidly, puzzling it out. “Wait, Lucifer. You’re worth _three hundred billion dollars_?”

“Three hundred forty- _two,_ ” He enunciates. It’s getting difficult to kneel upright, so he painstakingly unfolds his legs from beneath him. Chloe, wonderful person that she is, helps him untangle his legs and find his way back to sitting down. The tub is too small for his legs to lie straight, but at least now he can partially lean his back against the end. “I’ve been investing since property became a _thing_ , adds up after a while.”

He winces again, pulls his wings a little closer to his back. He really needs to get a hold on not saying anything not-human adjacent right now, especially when he has no room around him to put away two extremely vulnerable wings. Having them out around Dan feels like giving out an invitation to the wing-ectomy party. He pinches his hand hard, focuses as best he can on the pain, tries to chase the clarity. His wet clothes feel like ever-tightening ropes.

Unexpectedly, Dan laughs. “Wait, seriously?”

He raises his head to look at the bathroom instead of at himself. The fluorescent lights are starting to hurt his eyes. Dan’s crouched down on the ground, dropping pieces of tile into a bin. “I don’t lie, Daniel. Thought you knew that by now.”

Dan puts the bin back under the sink, standing up and dusting his hands off on his thighs. His tense stance seems to have unspooled itself into something less guarded. He leans against the wall. “So, what. You made money by being… the world’s oldest property magnate?”

Chloe settles herself down next to the tub instead of kneeling, cross-legged on the floor. He hadn’t noticed he was taking any cues from her, but his stiff limbs unlatch as she relaxes. He puts his hands together on his lap. The water is starting to numb his fingers, but the colder he gets the better he feels. Forming a full sentence is starting to feel less like climbing a mountain.

“Bit of this, bit of that,” he says. “Investments. Property. Favours owed and favours given. Can I close my eyes or are you going to shoot me?”

Dan’s half-smile drops. He’s quiet when he speaks, but sincere.

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

His head is swirling too much to puzzle out how he feels about that.

“Alright.” He closes his eyes against the light, tilting his head back as far as he can. His wings are in the way between his head and the tub, but with no room to fold them away, it’ll have to suffice. He listens intently for movement, but hears none. Chloe speaks up.

“ _Don’t_ pass out on us, Lucifer.”

“Believe me, Detective, to fall asleep in this bucket of ice, I would have to be a _lot_ higher than I am now.”

“Okay, good, so it’s working.”

“Yes, speaking of that. Did I hear you using Wikipedia as medical science down there?”

Chloe makes an attempt to sound unrepentant. “Yeah, well. It’s working.”

“Is there anything about me you won’t attempt to solve with crowdsourced encyclopaedias?”

He hears her phone click. A moment of silence. Her voice, when she speaks, has the rare quality of teasing.

“’Lucifer’ is the name of various mythological and religious figures associated with the planet Venus…”

“Forget I _asked_ ,” he groans. “If you edit anything parrot-y into that I’ll exact vengeance.”

“…Parrot-y?”

“Oh, hello, Daniel, I’d forgotten you were there. Has she told you her devious plan to marry me off yet?”

“What?”

Chloe sighs. He doesn’t have to have his eyes open to see her rolling her eyes. “I didn’t _know_ parrots _did_ that, Lucifer.”

“I’ll admit to being similarly unused to monogamy—”

“—Shut it—”

“—But _clearly_ the Detective doesn’t mind having a few parrot sister-wives if it helps solve a homicide—”

“— _Shut_ it.”

He laughs. He can’t feel his hands at all now, but he’s starting to feel like himself at least.

Dan’s voice has an edge of awed amusement to it. “You seduced the parrot?”

“I didn’t― Not on _purpose_.”

“What, you shine the wings at it or something?”

“ _Shine the wings at it_?”

“You know. Like those nature documentaries, with those shiny birds of paradise that dance at each other.” 

“You’re as bad as each other, I’m starting to see where the Detective gets—”

He makes the earth-shatteringly foolish mistake of opening his eyes.

Dan is standing by the sink, and Chloe is sat cross-legged by the bathtub, and both of them are looking at him, so neither of them have noticed that Trixie is standing in the doorway, staring right at him, her eyes wide.

“— _Oh!_ ”

He lurches upright, folding his wings as tight to his back as he can in the limited space. He needs to fold them away, but he would need at least double the space he has behind him to do so, oh _fuck,_ what does he do? _What does he do?_

Chloe and Dan follow his gaze and jolt. Trixie is still staring at him, her eyes following his wings. He drags himself up, his suit dripping as he scrambles his way out of the tub and steps back to the corner of the bathroom. As much distance as he can give her. He crushes his wings in behind him as best he can, but he can see the fluorescent light reflecting from his feathers in the glint of her eyes. He forces one slow breath, then another.

“He-ey, monkey,” Chloe says, panic inflected in her voice. “Uh, you caught us, Lucifer’s trying on a costume—”

“No way that’s a costume,” Trixie says, “They’re _moving_ with him.”

“It’s a very good costume,” Dan says. “He’s rich, he can afford, uh, animatronics.”

Trixie’s eyes narrow. “To wear in the _bath_?”

This is the moment where he ought to offer his own explanation, but his mind has gone entirely blank with panic. Trixie takes the silence for herself, her eyes locking on his.

“Lucifer, you don’t lie,” she says. “Are those wings real?”

Chloe and Dan will cover for him. They’ll come up with something, a reasonable excuse, a lie, _anything but the truth_. His head is starting to swirl again; he realises he’s holding his breath. He exhales and inhales again, forces air into his lungs. Chloe locks eyes with him, bites her lip in thought.

“Trixie,” Chloe says, getting up, walking over to Trixie and taking her by the arm, “Go wait downstairs, okay? We’ll be down in a moment.”

“But—”

“ _Now._ ”

Trixie looks over to Dan, then him, then Chloe, and then turns around and leaves. Her footsteps are hard to hear on the staircase. Chloe exhales sharply. 

“Okay,” she says. “Dan, you have any clothes he can borrow?”

“Yeah,” Dan says.

“Go get some.”

Dan doesn’t argue or hesitate: he walks right out of the bathroom. Chloe shuts the door but doesn’t lock it. She walks up to him, takes him by the shoulders and looks him in the eye.

“Gonna help you out of the clothes. Get you dry. Can we get them off without cutting the suit?”

He nods numbly. She helps him out of the clinging suit jacket and it falls to the floor: she frowns between it and his wings.

“How’s that work?”

“No time,” he says. Absurdly, now he’s _out_ of the water, he’s starting to shiver. His fingers are too numb for buttons, so she gets him out of the waistcoat and shirt. There’s a knock on the door by the time she’s helped him wrestle off his belt and trousers.

“Got some,” Dan says. Chloe goes for the door, opens it. A hushed whispering conversation takes place. He could listen if he wants, but now that he’s just about back to an even kilter, he needs to focus on his plan for the next five minutes. He leans into the sink, closes his eyes, replays the fuzzy memory of coming into Dan’s house. There’s a back door by the kitchen. It’s partially visible from the living room, but he can ask for help. One last time.

The door shuts again and Chloe taps him on the shoulder.

“Hey. Got some clothes for you. They’re not Armani or whatever, but—”

“Chloe,” he manages. He doesn’t open his eyes. He can’t look at her right now. His teeth are threatening to chatter with the cold, but he holds his jaw forcefully in place. “I can go for the kitchen door, but I’ll need you to distract her. Play fetch with her or something. I can run that far, I think, but not as fast as usual.”

Silence behind him. A soft _flumph_ of an armful of clothes hitting the ground.

He grits his teeth and scrunches his eyes shut. He’s not a fool, he knows what she’s about to say. She’s told him she’s not running, she’s asked him not to run, and he’s very literally about to run, so what _else_ can she say to that? She’s given him everything. Last night he told her he loved her. He’s betraying that promise he’d given her in return, that implicit _trust_. He’ll tell Chloe that he’s too much of a coward to tell a child the truth to her face, to watch innocence die in her eyes, and Chloe will affirm his cowardice, and he’s going to _run anyway_. He cannot do this. He can’t do this.

He hadn’t realised how bad the shivering had become until a warm body wraps itself around him, face burying itself in the space between his wings, arms wrapping around his waist. He tenses up as best he can, tries to hold himself still, but the shivering only increases twofold. He keeps his eyes closed, because he can feel them starting to burn, and he’s cried enough this week. He’s done enough.

“I’m scared, too,” Chloe says into his back. “But she’s a smart kid, okay? It might take some time, maybe some distance at first, but it’s going to be alright.”

He can’t abide lying. He whispers it, because otherwise his voice is going to betray him.

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t,” she admits, “But I have faith.”

He shakes his head. He opens his eyes, stares at the sink. The whole bathroom is soaked in water droplets, so one more splashing down won’t be noticed. “In _what_?”

Chloe’s cheek shifts incrementally from his spine to a wing. The warmth soaks into his skin, makes him flutter. “You.”

She’s gone before he can say anything, her warmth dissipating from his skin and sucking into the air, and he turns in shock and he’s met with a faceful of towel. He yanks it from his face but the bathroom door has already closed.

Standing alone in the center of the bathroom, he has just enough room to fold his wings away. He collapses his head into the towel, scrubs his face dry. He drags it over his hair, body, eyes, until he’s stopped dripping onto the floor. He strips out of the last of his clothes, puts on Dan’s cast-offs mechanically. The black sweatpants come halfway up his calves, and the green Henley is tight at his shoulders and boxy at his waist, but he can’t bring himself to care. His head feels, in simultaneous sensation, empty and impossibly heavy.

He stares at the door.

_Inhale for four. Hold for seven. Exhale for eight._

_Inhale for four. Hold for seven. Exhale for eight._

_She loves you. She has faith in you._

_You love her. You trust her._

_You’re her partner. She’s your partner._

_Open the door._

He makes his way downstairs uncertainly, gripping the banister for stability: maybe he couldn’t have run away after all, he’s walking like a newborn foal. Trixie’s sitting, legs kicking impatiently, on the sofa. Dan’s sitting beside her: he’s used to Espinoza looking vacant, but his face is so perfectly neutral right now that it could only be on purpose. Chloe’s placed herself on an opposing sofa, enough of a gap between herself and the arm of it that it’s clear where he’s expected to go. He wants to thank her just for making that easy for him. He’s not sure how close he can get right now without causing a child’s nightmares. He sits on the sofa. He can’t meet Trixie’s eyes, so he looks to Chloe. Chloe leans forward, hands wringing, looking at Trixie where he can’t.

“Trixie, baby, do you remember the talk we had last week during Twilight?”

He fixes his gaze at a point on the wall just above Trixie’s face, so he can watch her in the periphery of his vision. Trixie’s eyebrows lower, frowning.

“…Uh. That we’d… watch the rest later.”

Chloe breathes out a laugh. “No, monkey. When the character was looking up vampires, and you very smartly said that she should just ask him for the truth.”

He swallows. He can see Dan placing a shaking hand on Trixie’s knee. Fear is spiking into every nerve, every sinew.

“…Yes?”

“…Trixie, Lucifer is the Devil.”

“I mean, yeah?”

He shakes his head. He has to take over. He fixes his eyes on Trixie, prays to the only thing he believes in that they won’t turn red. His prayers are answered by her warm hand over his as he speaks.

“What your mother is saying is that I… Beatrice, the wings were real. I am, truly, the Devil.”

Trixie looks right back at him, her eyes fixed on his, sincere. “Yeah, Lucifer, I know. _Obviously._ ”

He blinks.

“Obviously?”

Chloe’s eyes are bugging out of her head. “Obviously?”

Trixie rolls her eyes at Chloe. “Uh, duh? I mean, I’d never seen Lucifer do stuff but he talks about it all the time, and so does Maze and I’ve seen _her_ face—”

His jaw drops. “— _Excuse me?_ ”

Chloe and Dan swing their heads between Trixie and himself like spectators at a tennis match.

Trixie stares him down like he’s stupid. “Her face! You know…” She gestures vertically over her own face. “Half-human, half-spooky?”

“Half- _spooky_?!”

He’s starting to wonder if there had been any more left in that syringe. Perhaps he ought to swing by the veterinary practice again. He needs to not be sober for this. Is it bad form to shoot up at a family meeting? His mouth is opening and closing but it’s not making any sound, he _really_ ought to do something about that.

Chloe’s starting to make a pained noise from the back of her throat. “Trix, _when_ did that happen?”

“I don’t know, a couple Halloweens ago? She said it was her ‘costume’, but like, come _on_ . She’s a demon, of course it’s her costume.” Trixie grins. “We got _so_ much candy.”

Dan coughs in shock. Chloe stares at Trixie. He, for his part, lets go of Chloe, drops his head in his hands, and tries to make sense of the world he’s living in. He can’t even find the wherewithal to decide what punishment he’ll exact on Maze when he sees her next, because he needs to connect the dots of this conversation until _any_ of it makes sense. He muffles his disbelieving question into the palms of his hands.

“ _You’ve known for_ _years_?”

Trixie sounds vaguely confused. “I mean… if it was a secret, you’re _really_ bad at secrets.”

His returning laugh sounds mildly hysterical, even to him. Perhaps he isn’t completely sober yet. Perhaps he’s hallucinating all of this. That’ll be it. Nice obvious solution, he’s still in the bathtub, drowning, having the trip of the end of his very long life.

Around him, unheeding of the fact that they all must be figments of his overactive imagination, Chloe and Dan continue their interrogation.

“Trixie,” Dan says, “Trix, are you _okay_? If you’ve been too, too scared to say anything—”

He picks himself back up, sits up straight, looks at her, because he’s coming to a similar train of thought as Dan and he needs to see her, needs to face that if it’s the truth. Trixie snorts, her nose wrinkling up with amusement.

“Dad, I’m _fine_. Lucifer can’t even win at Monopoly, how scary could he be?”

Ordinarily, he’d contest that remark, because he’s beaten her e _xactly_ once and he’s happy to restage the game move for move should she have any trouble recalling, but his stomach seems to have descended into the foundations of the house. Reality is starting to assert itself, along with a headache that feels only partially tranquiliser-induced. Trixie knew before Dan, before Chloe, before— if he’s assuming correctly, if he’s guessed the year accurately— _she knew before Linda._ Not just a belief, not just a child’s assumption. She witnessed Maze’s face. She had objective proof that she lived with a demon and played Monopoly with the Devil.

She’d turned up to his penthouse alone, mere months ago, and _demanded he tell her a story_.

_How scary could he—_

_How scary could he be?_

His organs might be trying to bunch themselves up in his throat. That or he’s dying. Perhaps both. Vulnerability, you never know what might happen next. He may be stuck staring at her. Chloe returns her hand over his and squeezes it, perhaps checking for signs of life.

Trixie frowns between Dan and Chloe.

“Wait, so you _didn’t_ know?”

Dan finds his voice, although it seems to be similarly squeezed by that selfsame mortal symptom of all-your-organs-in-your-throat-at-once. “Monkey, a lot of— crazy people— think they’re the Devil. We just weren’t sure that he was _actually_ the Devil.”

“Honestly, Daniel,” Lucifer says. Something’s coming back to life in his head. Perhaps it’s coming alive for the first time. “Only a crazy person would wear _this_ getup on a day-to-day basis.” He gestures down at the thin mass-produced fabric. “Perhaps you ought not to throw stones in this particular glass house.”

Trixie’s frown is transforming into genuine disbelief. “Wait, _mom_? _You_ didn’t know?”

“Not… _immediately_ ,” Chloe says awkwardly, “He… I mean, I saw his face a bit later than you saw Maze…”

Trixie blinks over at Lucifer. “You have a face too?”

“Believe me when I say, urchin, that despite Maze’s unfortunate appearance I wasn’t King of Hell for having a prettier one. You’re best off not seeing it.”

Trixie pouts. She truly pouts. “You’re so boring sometimes.”

Lucifer coughs. “ _Boring_?”

Chloe shrugs. Her eyes are sparkling. “She said it, Lucifer, you’re boring.”

“The _Devil_ is boring.”

Dan’s lips twitch up into a smirk. “Yeah, Lucifer.”

Lucifer looks over at Trixie, shaking his head helplessly. “Aren’t you being taught _against_ peer pressure and bullying, child? Look what you’ve done to your parents. Mortals are easily led, you know.”

Trixie laughs at the Devil. “You’re weird,” she says, before crossing the impossible distance and throwing her arms around him.

For once, he doesn’t flinch.

* * *

“Dude, that isn’t how it works. Like at all. How long have you been working with us?”

“Frankly, Miss Lopez, if I’ve been working here longer, then I think you ought to take me at my word. I’ve been consulting the LAPD for years, you know.”

“You _really_ think that parrots can go on death row?”

“If the _parrot_ commits the murder―”

“Parrots _legally_ can’t commit murder!”

Ella swings the cat carrier as she talks, and Big Bird makes a series of indignant chirps from inside the the plastic cage. She looks down at the wire door in surprise.

“Woah, he does R2-D2?”

Lucifer had thought he’d heard every euphemism there was, but that’s a new one. “Never mind what he’s up to in there, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Parrots kill other parrots, you know.”

He hits the call button for the penthouse. Ella frowns up at him.

“…Okay?”

“The legal definition of murder relies on mens rea and actus reus, Miss Lopez. Parrots, including the blue-and-gold macaw, will occasionally kill others of their own species in territorial or romantic disputes. An _act_ of criminality― murder― carried out with _intent_. If the LAPD were doing their jobs properly, they would have made Big Bird here into a kebab.”

The lift arrives, but Ella pins him in place with a frown. There’s something occurring to her, he can see it. She’s finally going to see sense and this hour-long argument will end in victory.

“…Have you been googling parrots all day? Is that what you were doing on your phone?”

He’d thought the low point of his day would be handing Ella an open-ended favour to help him kidnap a parrot from evidence, but apparently his ego hasn’t been entirely pounded flat yet. He steps into the lift with Ella, clears his throat, and resists the urge to kick the cat carrier.

“Candy Crush, actually.”

“Yeah, and _then_?”

Perhaps he should just kill Big Bird himself before he has to suffer through any more indignities.

“…I was _not_ googling them _all day_.”

She laughs at him from the ground to the penthouse, and the building has enough floors that he’s starting to fear for her sanity long before they get to the halfway mark. Ella wipes at her eyes as they emerge. Dan and Chloe, in some sort of conversation by the bar, frown across at them.

“What’s up?” Dan asks.

Ella smirks. “Lucifer’s a bird person.”

Dan nearly drops the beer in his hand. “Wait, he _showed_ you?”

“What?”

“Uh.”

Chloe interjects. “Oh- _kay_ , how’d it go? Get him alright?”

Lucifer takes the cat carrier from Ella and jostles it a little. From within, Big Bird tweets inanely.

“Hey, don’t― oh, _cool,_ he does Mario too?” Ella crouches down to look through the door. “Aren’t _you_ a smart birdie? Yes you are! Yes you are! Hello!”

“E-lo,” Big Bird parrots.

Chloe shoots Lucifer a look that is far too self-satisfied for her own good. She mouths ‘smart birdie’. Lucifer fantasises about an electric chair fit for a parrot.

“Right, shall we get on with this before anyone gets too attached to the winged rat?”

Ella smiles vapidly at the bird. “He doesn’t mean that. No he doesn’t. No he doesn’t. He’s just grumpy ‘cause birds can’t go to jail for manslaughter.”

“ _Murder_.”

Chloe rolls her eyes. “Lucifer, you heard the vet as well as I did, Big Bird knocked the axe off the shelf. Even if a bird could go to jail— I cannot believe I’m enabling this argument— he would go to jail for _manslaughter_.”

Dan shakes his head. “I can’t believe I agreed to turn up for this.”

Chloe leads the way to the balcony. “Remember, when they ask, we went to Yaki-Nori for a post-case lunch.”

“Technically true, in a manner of speaking, I’ve ordered half the menu.”

“This is a dumb risk to take for a bird.”

“Believe me, Daniel, I agree, but— oh, bloody hell.”

Lucifer winces into the sudden shock of sunlight. Chloe pulls her sunglasses from her pocket. Ella grimaces into the light.

“Woah, did you put mirrors on the floor or something?”

“Or something,” he agrees uncomfortably. A cloud passes over the sun, and the ground becomes visible in the glare. Dan frowns down at it.

“…Interesting colour. For the floor.”

Chloe turns her head slowly to Dan. In spite of the sunlight, Lucifer can see the cast of embarrassment on her face.

“It’s getting replaced,” she says firmly.

“As soon as I can bribe a city official for a permit,” Lucifer adds. Chloe frowns.

“You can’t just call in a favour?”

“Yes, well, I did away with any favours I had outstanding when I asked for half of L.A.’s CCTV tapes. And to get several hundred videos taken down on Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat. Can you believe that there are humans out there still using Snapchat? Oh, and the traffic tapes, the speeding, the parking fines, and not to mention yet _another_ restaurant that refuses to let me make reservations anymore."

Ella’s eyebrows make their way skyward. “Woah, really? Why'd you do all that?”

“It was a long Sunday. Shall we?”

Ella takes the cat carrier from him and kneels on the floor. Chloe clears her throat and looks away briefly. Dan’s still staring at the ground like it might bite him. Lucifer is going to give some lucky individual in planning permission a _blank check_ if they’ll permit the immediate use of dynamite.

“Gotta say,” Dan says eventually, “This is a really bad idea.”

Chloe turns back. “And why’s that?”

“I mean. It’s gonna be the only parrot in L.A. It’s not like people won’t _notice_.”

Chloe shakes her head, the lenses of her sunglasses glinting gold. “Pasadena has a whole posse of feral parrots. It’ll be a drop in the escaped parrot ocean.”

Ella fiddles idly with the wire door. “Gotta say, while I _really_ wanna ask about how many parrot facts you’ve all been learning, I agree with Dan. There’s feral parrots and then there’s pet parrots, you know? Big Bird’s lived indoors all his life; he doesn’t know how to live outside.”

Lucifer furiously tamps down the spike of misplaced empathy in his chest. He does not feel _anything_ for this feathery parasite.

“In which case, Miss Lopez, I would consider his hour of freedom _well_ overdue. He ought to gain the choice to stay caged or fly free.”

Three heads turn to him. From within the cat carrier, Big Bird makes a sound like a ringtone.

“Aw, Lucifer,” Ella says, grinning, “That’s really sweet.”

“Say that again and I’m taking this killer to the authorities myself.”

“Alright, alright, break it up,” Chloe admonishes. “I want lunch, let’s do this.”

Ella unlatches the door and stands up. He takes a careful step back, and Chloe smirks at him.

Big Bird hops onto the floor. He ruffles his wings and stretches them wide, yellow plumage glinting in the light. His head tilts in confusion: he hops again, and then pecks strangely at the ground, beak scraping at the oil-drenched concrete. Dan leans in.

“Can it see itself or something?”

Chloe coughs. Lucifer frowns at her, and she coughs some more, her shoulders shaking wildly. He glares, and she covers her hand with her mouth. Ella joins Dan in staring at Big Bird, who is continuing to slide his beak over the floor. He’s not even _looked_ at Lucifer yet, preoccupied as he is with his ministrations.

 _Oh._ Because the bird is technically mated to… oh, he’s going to kick it. He is _going_ to kick it. He refuses to bear witness to a bird trying and failing to preen him.

“Go on,” he snaps, “Shoo.”

Big Bird’s head snaps up at his voice. He may have made a mistake.

“Pretty bird,” Big Bird tweets.

“No,” Lucifer says, taking a step towards the penthouse, “Absolutely not, we’ve granted you amnesty from your crimes and freedom from your cage so if you could just— _No!_ ”

His coworkers and partner do _nothing_ to save him, cruel traitorous bastards that they are. Big Bird lands heavily on Lucifer’s shoulder and pushes its head into his cheek. Lucifer freezes up, hopeful that if he stands still for long enough the creature won’t be able to see him. Chloe puts her hand on the railing and doubles over, cackling.

“Detective,” he says from between his teeth, “Shoot it.”

Chloe shakes her head, taking off her sunglasses to wipe at her eyes. Big Bird nuzzles his head into Lucifer’s face a little more, then turns and pushes his beak into his hair, stroking it out of place. Ella, from the noise she makes, is apparently about to take off into space.

“Oh my god Lucifer _don’t move_ I _have_ to get a picture of this,” she gushes, fishing in her pocket for her phone. Chloe waves an encouraging hand at Ella, beyond words. Lucifer turns pleading eyes at Dan, whose lips are twitching.

“Name your price, Daniel,” he begs. Dan seems to lose a battle with his mouth, which splits into outright amusement. Big Bird is scraping his beak into Lucifer’s hair like he’s trying to strip hair gel from the strands.

“Stop stealing my food.”

“No.”

Dan shrugs, still smirking. “Ella, I’m gonna want a print of this.”

“Ningún problema.” Ella snaps the photo. Lucifer isn’t sure how his life got to this point.

Chloe rights herself, grinning. “Alright, okay, it’s been fun. C’mon, Big Bird, it’s time to go.”

Big Bird settles himself comfortably on Lucifer’s shoulder, ruffling up its feathers expectantly. Lucifer's eye twitches. He is the original rebel. The ruler of Hell. He is not, not, _not_ , going to help preen Big Bird. Chloe needs to save him before the creature can start to get violent.

Chloe walks over and pokes it. It pecks indignantly at her finger, giving a short sharp whistle.

“E-lo. Bad.”

Chloe pulls her jacket sleeve over her hand and slides Big Bird off his shoulder. The parrot pecks and bites at her sleeve indignantly, taking off and landing on the railing. 

Big Bird tilts his head at the cityscape. He tweets a song. The macaw spreads his wings and takes off. He locks his wings to sail in a high circle, caws jubilantly, and crosses behind the penthouse, blue feathers fading into the blue sky. 

Lucifer rushes for the sliding doors.

“Right, everyone in, you absolute _traitors_ , before it comes back and extorts me for chick support.”

The food delivery arrives right on time. As Dan and Ella unpack the bags from the lift, Chloe wanders over and whispers to him.

“Sorry your bird husband left you.”

He checks Dan and Ella are preoccupied before glaring at Chloe. He adds some Devil eyes into it, just to try and gain back his reputation. If anything, she only smiles wider. He shakes his head, letting the glare drop.

“King of Hell,” he grouses quietly. “Prostituted out to random parrots. Enjoying yourself?”

“Course not,” she says, with a tone that implies she very much is enjoying herself. “Gotta show them all who’s _really_ your bird husband.” She grimaces. “That… that makes no sense. You know what I meant.”

He tilts his head, feigning confusion. “Go on. Keep explaining it.”

“Shut up.”

“No, continue explaining, so far I’ve gotten that you’re my bird husband, am I following?”

“You _knew_ what I was saying, Lucifer.”

Ella pipes up from the sofa.

“By the way,” she says, “You get what we’ve done, right?”

He frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you _know_ that birds have like, homing instincts?”

Lucifer goes cold. “Homing instincts.”

“Yeah, I mean, pigeons do it most, I knew a guy that raced pigeons, he was weird, kept them in his apartment and made them wear diapers, but yeah, birds have crazy memories, and you did kind of release it on the most obvious balcony in L.A.”

This is it. He’s going to have to burn Lux to the ground. He’s not waiting for planning permission; this is an emergency. He can’t believe it’s all going to end this way.

“Wait, so,” Chloe says, blinking rapidly, “It could come _back?_ ”

“Probably,” Ella shrugs. “Seemed to like Lucifer a whole lot.”

He’s going to buy a net. He’s going to buy ten nets. And a sniper rifle.

“Did it occur to you to _say anything_ about this before we let it go?”

Ella grins. “It occurred to me, yeah.”

“Is there anyone on this accursed planet I can trust?”

“Hey,” Dan says evenly, “I offered help, you didn’t meet my demands.”

“I have standards, Daniel. I know that you might find the idea of upholding a personal standard a little too much to cogitate.”

Dan rolls his eyes. “Whatever you say, man.” He reaches over for a takeout bag, his jacket sleeve riding up, and that’s when Lucifer sees it.

There’s a crystal tied to Dan’s wrist.

He should pay for Dan’s home repair issues more often, it seems. It’s done wonders for their friendship. Lucifer’s still a little uncertain that fixing some drywall and a few tiles could cost two hundred thousand dollars, but if anyone’s home is infested with termites, it’s the home of one Daniel Espinoza. Besides, it _is_ L.A. Prices for bathroom refitting might be high. Especially if it’s full of woodworm.

So long as he keeps thinking of this as purely transactional, he’ll avoid saying anything overly emotional. It _is_ almost certainly transactional. Not everyone is Chloe Decker.

Chloe winces her entire way to the takeout, snapping apart some splintery wooden chopsticks. “Are we going to have to put a bird feeder outside?”

“There will not _be_ an outside,” Lucifer insists. He makes his way to the bar and pours himself a glass of the first bottle in his reach. “That balcony is getting bulldozed, _within the week,_ and I have half a mind to replace it with an electric fence.”

Dan raises his eyebrows, talks with his mouth full. Lucifer grimaces at the sight. If he can pay for Dan’s bathroom, perhaps he can pay for some etiquette classes too. A new wardrobe, while he’s at it.

“Y’really gonna bulldoze it?”

“He doesn’t like the disco floor,” Chloe says. He glares the best he can from across the room, and she rolls her eyes. There’s something simultaneously thrilling and terrifying about her all-encompassing lack of fear.

Dan and Ella manage to take off with almost all of the food, because they “still have work today” and “don’t all live like Iron Man”. Lucifer has no idea what that means, but Ella had been insistent, and had collected up the boxes of katsu curry before he could contest the comparison. Chloe, who tends to only take leave in one-day increments after cases, has the day off. 

By the way she immediately turns on and queues up a TV show, her plan isn’t the same as his, which involved a location closer to the bed and a copious amount of whipped cream, but he’s adaptable.

This is still new to him: togetherness. It took him more than a few of these ‘Netflix and no chill’ sessions to understand what she wanted from them. Sometimes she simply wishes to watch something with him: on those days, she’ll tilt towards the screen, attention rapt. Her eyes won’t stray to him, intent as she always is on collecting details, but she expects him to talk and commentate along with her. On other occasions, she’ll push close into him, as if hypothermic and seeking warmth; she’ll lazily turn her eyes from him to the screen to the inside of her eyelids. She’ll be quiet, or asleep. She’ll trust him to stay close.

She’s still settling down into the sofa, takeout box in hand and nearly finished, so he’s not yet certain what she wants from this afternoon. She hums thoughtfully around a mouthful of food.

“Maybe we _should_ put a bird feeder out,” she muses. “If this is his first time out of a cage, it might take a while before he figures out where to get food. Especially in a city.”

He leans back, takes off his cufflinks and pockets them, rolls up his sleeves. He watches her eat. Her eyes are glued to the screen, but she has the unthinking ease of coordination to eat without looking down. Her hair is neatly tied, in spite of her day off.

All ‘bird husband’ jokes aside, all of his personal disdain for Big Bird aside, he can’t help but love her for how ardently she concerns herself with the wellbeing of a single lonely parrot. She could throw up her hands and consider her good deed done, but consequences are as important to her as actions.

He shuffles himself across the leather. He pushes close to her.

It’s a balmy day in Los Angeles, and her body heat is unnecessary, but the pressure of her skin against his, the warmth through the cotton of her shirt, feels like the grounding for a lightning rod. He rests his head on her shoulder, lets the world tilt sideways on the fulcrum of her body. She says nothing, but her hands have stopped moving.

“I’ll buy some in tonight. You’re the expert. Wikipedia what they eat.”

Her exhale is gentle; lightly, fondly, lovingly amused.

“Okay.”

The silence stretches, but it is comfortable, and he wants to rest within it. He lets his eyes close. He feels the movement of her body as she finishes eating, tilting fractionally to set down the takeout box. Her hair tickles his ear as she rests her head upon his.

Lucifer unfurls his wings. He doesn’t bother to check which ones they are. He curls himself around her, and lets the weight of her safety carry him down into sleep.

* * *

Sometimes this happens: Chloe will wake up and there’s a wing on her head.

Lucifer does it gently, on occasion: wakes up before her, brings out his wings and tents her in feathers, watches his light mix into her hair as she wakes. They are well-matched like this, in bright morning sunlight: she’ll push with bleary annoyance at the wrist of his wing, squinting with blue eyes painted silver, and the feeling of Chloe’s hands against his feathers doesn’t feel overwhelming or unusual but simply _home_. He’ll let himself be pushed, all the way down beneath the covers, tracing her skin with sunlight and his fingers. Testing her patience. More often than not, before he can truly be done with her, she’ll have grabbed him by a wing and tugged. He’ll let himself be pulled, and they’ll crash together inelegantly for as long as they have before her infuriating phone alarm goes off. She knows that he does all of this on purpose, to keep her near, to wake her up, to convince her into sliding her hands through his wings, and yet she lets him. He’s her partner, and she loves him.

In other moments, her infuriating phone alarm goes off before they’ve woken. So far as Lucifer sees it, it’s infinitely easier to just manifest his wings and smack the thing off her bedside table than wait for her to emerge from deep snoring sleep. Chloe will sputter as his wing whaps into her, dive off the bed for her phone, swear at him that one day he’s going to smash the glass, _birdbrain, asshole._ He’ll sit up and stretch, arms high, wings brushing the ceiling, before lowering one right onto her head. She’ll sprawl down onto the mattress with the weight of it, batting at his coverts uselessly and calling him every name in the book, and he’ll laugh at her and dive in before she can escape to tickle her senseless. Lucifer knows she’s only arguing to hide the pink of her cheeks as he slides his primaries against her thigh, calling him ridiculous pet names to goad him into antagonising her until the tension breaks into sex they truly don’t have time for before work. He’d let her do it every minute of the day if they didn’t need to work or sleep or eat. She’s his partner, and he loves her.

Rare times, in pale sunlight or in rain, if she requests it or he’s feeling secure enough to try it, he’ll stretch out a bare red-stained wing. He’ll tentatively curl it around her, breathe a silent sigh of relief as she nestles into his warmth. Lucifer reserves his silence for these moments, presses into the bruise to push free the pain: he holds Chloe close and shows her his face and she does not run. Cool lips on his, blue eyes like the sky before a storm.

In time, when she asks and he’s steeled himself with Chloe’s love, he shows his face to Trixie. She solemnly declares it ‘awesome’. He has to excuse himself and go drive a lap of the neighbourhood so that he won’t have a breakdown in front of a _child_. When he comes back, they’ve set out Monopoly and terrible takeout pizza. It’s mundane and human and normal, and they’ve both _seen him_ , they _know_ he’s not any of those things, and yet they’ve already counted money out for the game, given him a token, set down a plate on the floor, as if he belongs. Lucifer mostly cheats during Monopoly, but he somehow still loses. The pizza is unspeakably bad, but he eats it without complaining more than twice. Chloe’s bedroom is arguably too small for his wings, but he wraps her in them anyway, holds her close that night and the next morning, barely sleeping with the thought that he is here and so are they and that there are no secrets in it. He discovers the hard way that, with vulnerability, his wing _can_ fall asleep beneath her. Chloe rolls her eyes from the doorway when he knocks over her lamp trying to shake it awake.

He is asked, not long after, to come to Dan’s house on a Sunday afternoon. He finds himself part of an impromptu urchin-demanded barbeque, featuring Chloe, Dan, and the aforementioned demanding urchin. He takes over the cooking just so he won’t have to watch Dan reduce the meat to charcoal. Chloe wanders over and tries to make herself a burger: he prepares it himself, goes to hand it to her, and then holds it over her head teasingly.

“If my father wanted you to have it,” he says, eyebrow arched, “He would have made you _taller._ ”

Chloe narrows her eyes, rounds the barbeque, walks him backwards with murder in her eyes. Lucifer holds the burger high, smirks as she stalks forwards; he plans to put it in his mouth and make her bite it away from him.

Unfortunately, preoccupied as he is with this plan, he misses the fact that she and Dan are making surreptitious hand signals to the _traitor_ that is their child. Something small and fierce connects with the backs of his knees, and Chloe grins, pushes him _hard_.

He _knows_ he’s on flat ground, he _knows_ she loves him, but the old fear flares through his spine like a lance. As he falls, he unfurls his wings, just in time to hit the water. Daniel’s swimming pool is small and unremarkable, overfull with leaves and silt, heady with chlorine. The world spins grey and blue and gold, his wings flailing, as he gets himself right-side-up and drags his head out of the water, spluttering as he grips the side of the pool for dear life.

The sky that emerges around him is not burning red, nor glittering silver. It is Los Angeles, gold and blue and bright, the sun glowing on a Sunday afternoon. Lucifer’s wings refract the starlight as he pulls himself towards it, out of the pool: he spits a leaf out of his mouth and stands sopping wet in the glow of his divinity, uselessly dusting himself down.

The mortal eyes that meet his are not overwhelmed nor afraid by the light he brings. In fact, by how much they’re all still laughing at him, he’s not certain they’ve really noticed the wings at all. Chloe grins at him, triumphant over the Devil. Her eyes are as blue as the sky, skin burnished gold by the light she painted on his wings. She picks up the burger he dropped on the ground, dusts off the bun, shrugs at him and takes a bite. She gets a little ketchup on her shirt, and Lucifer is reminded absurdly of an apocryphal story about apples and forbidden knowledge. Trixie snaps a picture as he swipes wet leaves from white feathers, giggling as she says something incomprehensible about sparkly vampires. Dan wipes a hysterical tear from his eye as he fetches him clothes, _again_. There is no glory and no fanfare, no fear, no worship.

He smells like chlorine the rest of the night, and he wonders if a baptism feels like coming home.

Lucifer puts his wing over her in the mornings. To keep her safe, keep her close, shield her from the rain, to just have them there to _have them_. He loses count of how often. There is no significance to a feather nestled in Chloe’s hair, the glint of a red glow refracted on her skin, the weight of his wings on their bed. There is only the endless, beautiful, wonderfully unexpected normal.

(Apart from those mornings when Chloe wakes him up by licking his preen gland and calling him ‘pretty bird’, but then what’s life without a _little_ abnormality? They are _them_ , after all.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A-a-and... Done. Next time I watch the show *before* I write the fic. And also next time, I don't decide chapter numbers ahead of making a chapter length estimate. This chapter is just shy of thirty thousand words, that's just downright inappropriate.
> 
> (Obligatory note: no medical science in this chapter was accurate. Don't try it at home. It was made up so I could get Lucifer in a bathtub.)
> 
> My thanks to venividivictorious for beta'ing the final chapter! Sorry for yelling at you about Big Bird for several weeks on end. I cannot guarantee I'm going to stop yelling about Big Bird anytime soon.
> 
> Hope you all enjoyed!


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